Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing: Partnering to manufacture a more resilient and sustainable future

By Colin Masson, Global Industry Marketing Director, Manufacturing

January 3, 2022

Content type
Thought leadership

A few months ago I laid out the 5 manufacturing trends driving the need for an industry cloud including my passionate and research-substantiated belief that partnerships and ecosystems are more critical than ever to manufacturing a resilient and sustainable future.

As observed by Catherine Kniker, Chief Strategy Officer, PTC:

“Manufacturing edge environments, are remarkably complex with high levels of infrastructure, data, and system variability across sites. They need to connect everything that matters in real-time. Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, with its emphasis on open standards, cloud-based architectures, global reach, and best-in-class security helps remove barriers and creates efficiencies that enable companies to scale their successes.”

Use the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing to empower your ecosystem

The Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing brings the best outcome-driven solutions and capabilities from Microsoft and our partners to accelerate time-to-value for our customers in an end-to-end, holistic, and scalable way. By connecting intelligent, integrated cloud, and edge capabilities of the Microsoft stack to the highest value manufacturing scenarios, we help businesses increase asset and frontline worker productivity in safe and secure factories, enable remote selling, and always-on service, and unlock cloud-based innovation—all with the utmost trust, security, compliance, privacy, and transparency.

Addressing the industry’s need for a platform that enables co-innovation and collaboration, our incredible ecosystem of industry partners expands the value of the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing with additional solutions to address today’s most pressing challenges. Leading partners extending Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing core capabilities include:

This is just a glimpse of the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, built to adapt to you on your terms and modularized to enable the digital transformation of your unique business. Here’s what some of our partners had to say about joining the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing preview:

Partners accelerating information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) convergence

“Global manufacturing customers are facing new imperatives to transform—not just the perennial priorities of reliability, safety, and efficiency, but also in terms of resilience, agility and sustainability of operations. We are pleased to make available the standard version of ABB Ability^TM Energy and Asset Manager through the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing. This latest step in our longstanding collaboration bringing together a distinctive blend of OT and IT expertise will support our joint value proposition for manufacturing customers aiming for long-term success.”—Andrea Temporiti, Head of Digital, ABB Electrification

“Rockwell Automation’s experience in OT and Microsoft’s expertise in IT is exciting as it gives us a modern way to help customers. The Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing promises the opportunity to create a unified data model extending from the OT side to the IT side of cloud. This enables Rockwell, Microsoft and our users to discover new insights and deliver value faster than ever.”—Andrew Ellis, VP Global Portfolio Engineering, Rockwell Automation

Increasing resilience of supply chains

“Increasing transparency across the supply chain to get everyone the insights and answers they need exactly when they need them (without breaking the bank or bogging down IT) is the perfect recipe for the cloud. That’s why Blue Yonder and Microsoft have been working together so closely to develop intelligent solutions that are scalable, mobile, secure, and highly available from anywhere and on any device—at a cost that beats what you might build in a datacenter.”—Hong Mo Yang, SVP Industry Strategy, Blue Yonder

“At a moment’s notice, today’s supply chains must be able to process information and make well-informed data-driven actions. To empower them, o9 Solutions is excited to be a part of the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing as a partner for end-to-end planning and analytics. The combination of o9’s Digital Brain, including solutions like Integrated Business Planning, with leading-edge cloud-based services, will empower clients to convert data into actionable insights to drive high-quality business-critical decisions.”—Igor Rikalo, President and COO, o9

Activating digital selling and enabling always-on service

“Experlogix has been in partnership with Microsoft for 20 plus years. Our Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software is built and delivered in Azure. We remain impressed with Microsoft’s commitment to customer experience and deep partner integration. Partnering on the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing will unlock innovation and activate digital selling. Experlogix and the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing will enhance the customer investment in technology and showcase a massive ROI with CPQ via our enterprise ready manufacturing configurator functionality that integrates with both Dynamics 365 Sales and Supply Chain Management.”—Tina Sanders, Strategic Alliance Director, Experlogix

“Industry changes, global competition, and increasing customer expectations are placing Manufacturers under immense pressure to shift to digital commerce. Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing delivers a comprehensive platform, applications and infrastructure, that scale to support manufacturing-specific solutions that drive this digital transformation. PROS Smart Configure Price Quote integrates seamlessly into Dynamics 365 as an out-of-the-box solution which enables manufacturers to accelerate the delivery of quote-to-cash strategies with optimized offers for every selling interaction. PROS and Dynamics 365 combined are a selling team’s central point of management for all quoting and sales agreement needs, empowering businesses to accelerate quoting speed from weeks to minutes, streamline approvals, and increase deal size.”—Les Rechan, Chief Operating Officer, PROS

“Over the last decade-plus, we’ve worked closely with Microsoft to deliver solutions that have transformed how manufacturers realize the full intent and value of their contracts. Three of the top five manufacturing companies in the world use the Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform running on Microsoft Azure, and they’ve extended contract performance throughout all aspects of manufacturing in order to deliver ethically sourced, environmentally sustainable, and globally compliant products. With the release of the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, we’re once again in a position to empower these and other industry leaders to further transform manufacturing and deliver more meaningful, measurable results from contract intelligence. To learn more, our solutions for Manufacturing can be found on Microsoft AppSource.”—Monish Darda, CTO and Co-founder, Icertis

“eLogic is excited to be a key partner for the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and utilize this powerful platform and common Industry Data Model to further enable manufacturers to harness the end–to-end connected business processes that span the elements of an Intelligent Enterprise. eLogic’s portfolio of industry-specific solutions including equipment360™ Field Service, Advantage Sales™, and Analytics and AI to support Demand and Supply Planning, Shop Floor Execution, and Inventory Management help our customers quickly achieve targeted business outcomes through connected use cases on the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing with data-centric, actionable intelligence,”—Tom McKee, Manufacturing Industry Principal, eLogic.

Adding insights that accelerate digitalization and unlock innovation

“AVEVA Insight presents a single, cost-effective digital dashboard to address these challenges while future-proofing industrial operations. By marrying the power of industrial data and AI with the scale and flexibility of Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, AVEVA Insight creates a manufacturing environment where workers can access real-time supply and production data and analytics within a single, unified window for enhanced decision-making. Customers benefit from agile and scalable plants, safe and cost-effective operations, and flexible, remote access across their networks. The results speak for themselves. At the WEF-recognized lighthouse at Lexington, Kentucky, Schneider Electric realized a 6 percent reduction in unplanned downtime using AVEVA Insight.”—Andreas Hartl, Senior Vice President Cloud, AVEVA

“The variables impacting product quality have become exponentially more complex during this time of disruption. Frequent changes to suppliers, staffing, target markets, regulations, and so on have increased the pressure on operations leaders to make effective decisions in a dynamic environment. Manufacturers welcome the flexibility and power to comb through terabytes of data and quickly hone in on the variables that impact quality and yield. SAS has “baked in” the most common advanced analyses required, along with built-in data models capable of handling high frequency, noisy sensor data from disparate manufacturing systems. Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing makes it easy to stand up that solution and deploy it enterprise wide. The result? Production operations transform from a reactive to a proactive, and profitable, approach.”—Marcia Elaine Walker, Global Industry Principal for Manufacturing, SAS

“Manufacturers are creating a digital thread along the entire value chain that combines design and engineering data with live data coming from the physical world via the internet of things. They are changing the basic fabric of the business, optimizing and innovating across functions to deliver business impact: reducing operational costs, maximizing revenue, and creating flexibility and agility. PTC’s solutions, ThingWorx, Servigistics, Creo, Vuforia, and Windchill help deliver this impact by increasing effectiveness in engineering and manufacturing, growing revenue and profits in service and parts, and making workforces more efficient with augmented training and work instruction—all while enabling the digital thread across the value chain.”—Catherine Kniker, Chief Strategy Officer, PTC

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing provides growth opportunities for partners

With Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, partners have greater ease and flexibility in building unique applications to respond with new and sometimes, groundbreaking solutions. Now more than ever, the manufacturing industry needs innovative, diverse, and transformative solutions that accelerate digitalization and empower a new era of hybrid work. We are honored that so many partners trust Microsoft to be their platform partner.

We invite you to follow Microsoft Manufacturing on Twitter and visit our Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing website to learn how Microsoft and our partners are helping manufacturers create a more resilient and sustainable future.