Since October 2022 Softline has been operating under the brand name Noventiq.

There is a growing skills gap and talent shortage in the workforce. Environmental sustainability has become imperative for manufacturing organizations. Fortunately, advances in technology give us the opportunity to impact employees, society, and planet for good.

Empower the workforce

As the manufacturing industry is disrupted by digital changes, the workforce is as well. Companies need to attract the next generation of talent while training the veteran employees at the pace of innovation. Businesses boost job satisfaction, enhance productivity, and streamline decision making with a fully equipped and empowered workforce. To reach that companies need to engage their workforce by automating the mundane, freeing them up for more creative and strategic endeavors on the front line like engaging with customers and partners. Utilizing AI and mixed-reality (MR) interaction models with robots/cobots to augment employee skills and improve shop floor agility, productivity, and safety are also important, as well as reaching new levels of safety and cyber/physical security with advanced technologies like ambient intelligence that reduce accidents, malicious incidents, product loss, and brand damage. Leveraging MR and team collaboration capabilities to redefine training and skills transfer to overcome skills gaps and keep pace with increased product and process complexity are necessary, with enabling front-line workers to do their best work by unifying devices, data, relationships, and processes in intelligent apps that guide them through best practices and compliance requirements.

To empower your workforce, equip your technicians with connected smart devices to deliver predictive service and enable proactive engagement throughout the product life cycle, empower your sales and service teams to provide customized experiences to strengthen customer relationships and build brand loyalty, and connect your employees to devices and processes by using industrial IoT and other smart technology to speed up production.

Delivering new services

Manufacturers need to stay one step ahead of their customers’ needs, identifying the best times and processes to refresh parts, supplies, and equipment. Predictive analytics is the number one AI use case for enterprises across manufacturing. By connecting people to devices using IoT and identifying failure- prevention patterns, manufacturers can reduce waste, maintenance costs, and downtime. Intelligent IoT (made of smart devices) can safely deliver exciting new experiences on a flexible, scalable, and secure cloud framework that can power high-tech business models.

Enable proactive engagement throughout the product life cycle by delivering new services, and customize sales and services to strengthen customer relationships and build brand loyalty.

Optimizing digital operations

In today’s market full of feature-saturated products and super-competitive prices, manufacturers are exploring ways to generate new business value using digital services to build stronger relationships with customers. The growing need to customize products and services for customers means agile and responsive end-to-end operations is more essential than ever. And getting the right products and services to the right customer at the right time requires integration of digital factories and intelligent supply chains.

Modernizing factory floor can help manufacturers create agile and responsive end-to-end operations and provide customers with customized products and services. By embedding AI into the products now, manufacturers can supply personalized and intelligent assistance, predictive maintenance, and remote monitoring after their products leave the factory. MR blends the physical and digital worlds, and paired with AI infused insights, manufacturers can use MR to visualize products before they’re manufactured; this allows them to change how you design, build, sell, and service their products.

To optimize digital solutions, speed up production by using industrial IoT and other smart technology to connect your people, devices, and processes, also take advantage of an optimized supply chain to produce the right products, at the right time, for the right price.

Reimagine manufacturing

By 2050, it’s expected that manufacturing will need 400 percent more water and agriculture will need a 70 percent increase in output to feed the world’s growing population. All at a time when public awareness has increased about the need to conserve natural resources. For manufacturers this not only presents new business challenges to use resources efficiently and reduce costs, it also presents an unmatched opportunity to generate value because of manufacturing’s reach to all sectors of goods, products, and resources.

While making the transformation to intelligent manufacturing, sustainability should be at the forefront to decrease supply chain costs and increase brand integrity. Technologies like digital twins, AI, and IoT can be used to monitor, control, and save water and energy usage to generate a lower footprint. Modern agriculture using these technologies has the power to help yield more crops and ensure food safety, truly serving the greater good.

Softline with the help of Microsoft solutions empowers manufacturers to solve today’s most pressing issues by arming leaders with the enterprise-grade business tools they need to augment employee skills, develop more sustainable products, and deliver the benefits of intelligent manufacturing to new customers and markets.