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In this case study:
Client: Blue Waters Products Ltd. (BWPL)
Industry: Manufacturing
Products and Services:
- Financial Forecasting & Reporting
- Costing & Procurement
- Scenario Planning & Projections
- Board®
- Microsoft® Dynamics™ ERP
Location: Caribbean
relied on their judgment, and we are glad that
we chose Board as it met all our criteria. The
team at Quisitive is reliable, always available,
and solution-focused with great problem-solving
skills.”
Overview
As a leader in beverage manufacturing & distribution in the Caribbean, Blue Waters Products Ltd. needed to evolve its financial planning, forecasting & reporting process to support further growth. Initially choosing the Board decision-making platform to replace Excel-based budgeting and reporting processes, Blue Waters Products Ltd. has since worked with premier Board Partner, Quisitive, to expand the use of the solution into scenario planning and projections, sales, costing & procurement, production planning, foreign exchange management, and cash flow management. Board is now being used by executives, department managers, budget contributors, sale managers, and finance for unified planning and monthly reporting and has transformed the company’s approach to planning & decision-making.
The Company
Established in 1999, Blue Waters Products Ltd. (BWPL) is one of the largest producers and distributors of beverage products in the Caribbean, manufacturing, and selling over 400 products, including the preferred brand of purified bottled water. Headquartered in Trinidad & Tobago, the company started with a dream and with just 12 employees.
Today, Blue Waters Products operates a world-class facility in Orange Grove with over 500 employees helping to serve over 20,000 customers. Named one of Trinidad and Tobago’s Best Managed Companies in 2019 by Deloitte, the company’s impressive growth and innovative business management practices have set the standard for beverage and distribution success in the Caribbean.
The Initial Challenge: Manual Planning and Siloed Data
When BWPL found itself in a period of fast growth, the finance and leadership teams realized that their existing budgeting, forecasting, and reporting methods in Excel were not sufficient.
At that time, most of the company’s sales, production, and financial data were kept in heavily formatted spreadsheets, which often led to lengthy delays in running quarterly reports or data queries and an immense amount of time spent consolidating versions of workbooks and distributing information. The process also did not allow for easy analysis or drill-down into critical transactional data. In addition, departmental data was heavily siloed. Sales volume budget and forecast numbers did not match what was used in production planning, and purchase orders were not considered in cash flow projections. This siloed approach limited the company’s visibility into key metrics and the accuracy of forecasts. The leadership team knew that the days of solely spreadsheet-based planning were behind them. They needed financial management and a decision-making platform to support growth and provide decision-makers with faster, better information.
“Our company has always retained a strong focus on continuous improvement through IT-driven systems,” said Manzur Mohammed, Head of Finance at BWPL. “We knew if we invested in a solution to optimize our planning and analysis, it would lend efficiencies and value that would propel our company into the future.”
The Solution: Unified Planning & Reporting
Having worked with Quisitive in the past to implement other key business systems like Microsoft Dynamics for enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management, and emPerform for employee performance management, BWPL knew the team could assist in finding and launching a new financial management solution. Manzur Mohammed, Head of Finance at BWPL, had a particular set of solution criteria in mind and tasked Quisitive with finding a solution that could deliver.
Solution Criteria:
- Easy financial and management reporting and dashboard
- Seamless integration with Microsoft Dynamics ERP
- Ability to accommodate complicated budget calculations involving SKU and customer channels and personnel expenses
- Audit trail capabilities with versioning
- Automated workflow with approvals
- Security and flexibility
After analyzing the company’s needs, Quisitive recommended the Board decision-making platform.
“Since Quisitive is our strategic partner, we relied on their judgment, and we are glad that we chose Board as it met all our criteria. The team at Quisitive is reliable, always available, and solution-focused with great problem-solving skills," said Subrian, CEO, BWPL.
Being a premier Board Partner and having implemented the solution at other similar companies, Quisitive knew that to ensure a successful launch of Board, they would have to undertake a phased approach involving several departments and teams.
“We split the implementation of Board into key stages that would allow us to review, evaluate, and plan much better,” said Quang Dinh, Lead Solution Designer at Quisitive. “We worked closely with different functional areas of Blue Waters Products to plan and execute critical short-term milestones while simultaneously ensuring a smooth launch and integration of other Board modules and tools.”
“Knowing BWPL’s vision and growth plans, Quisitive worked with us to implement models to serve our immediate needs best as well as assisting us to introduce new models to meet our long-term goals,” said Manzur. “We started with the cost center costing and budget models. After finishing that, we extended to the sales budgeting model, which feeds data into the cost budgeting model to provide full Income Statement reports.
Next, we implemented the sales reports and dashboard model, pulling data from multiple operational systems of ours. Then we included trade asset reports and analysis to help us make the best use of our marketing dollars. Finally, we implemented a full-scale production and procurement planning using budgeted volume sale, bills of materials, and real–time purchase orders to plan our production and inventory.”
Results
Integrated & Timely Business Decision Making
Using Board, BWPL has been able to experience the many benefits of automated data management & approvals, integrated planning, and real-time stakeholder reporting.
Significant Time Savings
“Board has helped cut the processing times of our budgeting and forecasting cycles significantly,” said Manzur. “Instead of doing quarterly forecasting, we are now forecasting monthly, all the way from revenues, production, procurement, operating costs, and personnel expenses. Board users can work on their forecast, review their monthly and quarterly expenses, and review their sales, all in one platform anytime as they wish.”
Monthly Forecasts & Scenario Analysis
“The biggest benefits that we have experienced using Board is being able to forecast monthly and conduct effective scenario analysis,” continued Manzur. “This was not possible before using spreadsheets and has helped us to make sound and timely production, procurement, and financial decisions.”
Multi-faced Reporting
“The dimensionality concept of data stored in Board and the ease of adding groupings, attributes, and hierarchies are significant benefits for us,” said Manzur. “We can slice and dice and review our data from different angles very easily, giving us a multi-faceted view of our business that would only be possible with a solution like Board.”
User Dashboards
“Using Board and the Board Report Central framework developed by Quisitive, our super-users can quickly and easily create their own reports and dashboards for analysis,” said Manzur. “This has resulted in trend analysis and insight that helps our leaders and Board of Directors make better decisions.”
Flexibility & Scalability
“Board’s flexibility and scalability are key and are why we have been able to get a phenomenal return on our IT investment,” continued Manzur. “There is simply no other application that offers the flexibility, feature-set, and usability that Board has delivered.”
“Board has helped us to transform how we approach budgeting & business planning. Quisitive helped us tap into the full potential of this powerful solution, and Board is now our company-wide decision-making platform,” continued Manzur.
The Future of Board at BWPL
Quisitive continues to work with BWPL to extend the Board platform even further by enhancing existing models and creating new models that will track select initiatives and non-financial metrics, including:
- Using Board to create a customer ROI analysis model to evaluate returns at the marketing spend and customer levels.
- Enhancing the sale budgeting process with integrations that will allow for the automated insertion of values and allow for planning & insights at the product SKU level.
“Board has helped us to transform how we approach budgeting & business planning. Quisitive helped us tap into the full potential of this powerful solution, and Board is now our company-wide decision-making platform," said Manzur Mohammed, Head of Finance, BWPL.
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Greene Tweed is a specialty engineering and manufacturing company that engaged Quisitive to execute a specific vision: a Smart Factory solution.
Learn how Quisitive built the Azure infrastructure to enable their vision with a solution that spans from source through reporting. With this new solution, Greene Tweed can now leverage Azure Data Factory to make more informed decisions based on real-time data and predictive modeling.
Other topics in this video include:
Watch the video to learn more about how Quisitive helped Greene Tween build their Smart Factory and improve safety efficiency, and productivity in their factories.
See more of our work with Greene Tweed in our other video, Quisitive Builds Modern Data Platform for Greene Tweed. Watch Now >
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When Greene Tweed decided they wanted to take a more holistic approach to their data governance, they looked for a partner who could help them build a modern data platform with advanced analytics capabilities and the ability to scale.
Machine data, enterprise asset data, and corporate data from CRM systems, ERP systems, and more needed to be brought together and correlated appropriately to glean deeper insights for the business.
Watch the full video to learn how Quisitive created a robust, modern data platform at Greene Tweed that has allowed the company to realize its vision of being a truly data-driven organization.
Other topics covered in this video include:
See more of our work with Greene Tweed in our other video, Greene Tweed Develops and Deploys Smart Factory with Quisitive. Watch Now >
TORONTO, April 18, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Quisitive Technology Solutions, Inc. (“Quisitive” or the “Company”) (TSXV: QUIS, OTCQX: QUISF), a premier Microsoft solutions provider and payments solutions provider, has recently announced its successes in delivering innovation across platforms and business needs for manufacturing firms. The Company has a deep expertise in the manufacturing industry, and its track record of delivering high-quality digital transformation solutions has earned it a reputation as a trusted partner.
Accelerate American Manufacturer’s Digital Transformation Journey with Azure Migration
Quisitive recently supported an American manufacturer’s expanded investment into Microsoft Azure. The Company assessed the customer’s readiness to move to Azure, identified potential workloads for migration, and provided a complete cost analysis and roadmap that validated the cost-effectiveness of the move. The initial assessment led to an additional contract for the migration of nearly 900 servers to Azure from both on-premises and competing cloud providers. This project required a deep understanding of cloud computing and the ability to leverage Microsoft Azure to provide cost-effective, scalable solutions for the client. Quisitive is delivering true digital transformation on all fronts, providing a seamless transition to the cloud for the customer.
Design Smart Factory Leveraging Microsoft Technologies
Quisitive designed and delivered a new smart factory digital transformation for a large specialty engineering manufacturing firm. The project was designed to reduce the tedious and dangerous work on manufacturing lines while also improving facility efficiencies. The customer partnered with Quisitive on a cloud adoption framework assessment that led to a new Azure-based cloud data infrastructure. The Company developed and implemented new data infrastructure to connect data silos and enable IoT devices on equipment, new quality assurance processes, and improved forecasting and predictive modelling. The Company also supports the optimization of their technology landscape through its Azure Management Services program for performance and security. Quisitive created a robust, modern data platform that has allowed the customer to realize its vision of being a truly data-driven organization.
Connect Manufacturers with Digital Workplace Implementation
Finally, Quisitive delivered the deployment of 5,000 Teams Phone licenses with calling plans and/or direct routing for another manufacturing firm. The customer had several phone systems it needed to unify, so Quisitive leveraged Microsoft’s FastTrack program to quickly assess the problem, envision a solution, and plan for implementation. Ultimately, the customer selected Microsoft Teams Phone over several competitors’ solutions. This engagement required expert knowledge of Microsoft Teams and the ability to deploy it at scale. Quisitive’s success helped the manufacturer achieve greater collaboration and communication among its teams.
Quisitive’s successes in the manufacturing industry demonstrate its ability to deliver innovative solutions that meet the unique needs of its clients. The Company’s deep expertise in the manufacturing industry, combined with its technological acumen, make it an ideal partner for manufacturers looking to drive growth and increase efficiency.
Recent Developments
Additionally, the Company has granted an aggregate of 6,955,529 restricted share units (“RSUs”) to certain officers and management of Quisitive, of which 1,837,229 RSUs vested upon the date of grant, and 5,118,300 RSUs will vest over the next three anniversaries following the grant date. Once vested, each RSU will allow the holder to acquire one common share in the capital of Quisitive. A portion of common shares issuable upon the vesting of these RSUs have been sold by the holders for personal, tax, and financial planning purposes and is not a reflection on the future prospects of the Company.
About Quisitive:
Quisitive (TSXV: QUIS, OTCQX: QUISF) is a premier, global Microsoft partner that harnesses the Microsoft cloud platform and complementary technologies, including custom solutions and first-party offerings, to generate transformational impact for enterprise customers. Our Cloud Solutions business focuses on helping enterprises move, operate, and innovate in the three Microsoft clouds. Our Payments Solutions division, leverages the PayiQ platform powered by Microsoft Azure to transform the payment processing industry into an entirely new source of customer engagement and consumer value. Quisitive serves clients globally from seventeen employee hubs across the world. For more information, visit www.Quisitive.com and follow @BeQuisitive.
Quisitive Investor Contact
Matt Glover and John Yi
Gateway Investor Relations
[email protected]
949-574-3860
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In this case study:
Client: Thermon Inc.
Industry: Manufacturing
Products and Services: Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dynamics Sales & Marketing
Country: USA
About Thermon
Thermon Inc. is a leading global provider of reliable and safe innovative thermal solutions since the 1950s. The organization specializes in providing complete flow assurance, process heating, temperature maintenance, freeze protection, and environmental monitoring. They offer modern solutions for industrial heating applications that serve the global energy, power generation, and chemical markets. The company operates in 25 countries with headquarters in Austin, Texas.
Quisitive previously worked with Thermon to implement an intranet solution to improve employee communication and collaboration. From project creation to completion, Thermon enjoyed the customer experience and built a strong relationship with the Quisitive team so when they needed help with their Dynamics 365 Sales environment, they didn’t hesitate to reach out. After the implementation of Dynamics 365 Sales, Thermon decided that they needed a partner, a Dynamics expert, to help them optimize and improve their customer engagement through sales and marketing channels. Quisitive was selected to help.
Challenge
Thermon’s Sales and Marketing teams identified priority areas that needed improvement to ensure data integrity, enhance the user experience, and deliver a consistent performance to ultimately enhance customer engagement. The company wanted to avoid inaccurate pictures of the customer life cycle and needed policies that could help them accomplish that.
Another goal was to integrate the CRM, ERP sales quotation function, and the email system to support the business’s requirements to develop an enterprise-wide view of the customer’s journey. Furthermore, the team needed to cut down on manual and time-consuming activities to save time and money, as well as reduce technical debt to take advantage of new Microsoft functionality as it is released.
Solution
Thermon needed help reimagining its Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing environment to address their business priorities. Quisitive helped Thermon with a multi-phase approach that started with an innovation workshop to discover “the art of the possible” and identify near-term transformative activities. The purpose of this workshop was to collect feedback on what was working and learn more about their pain points. A prioritized roadmap for improvements was created after the workshop, which included the following components:
- Creating a single source of truth for customer data
- Achieving an enterprise-wide view of their customers
- Empowering sellers with 360-degree visibility into customer information in real-time
After the workshop, Thermon opted for Quisitive’s Dynamics Program, a subscription service that monitors and delivers strategic recommendations on a consistent basis. Thermon was paired with a dedicated Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing coach and an entire team of experts to work with their team and ensure that their line-of-business solutions drive the most value for their organization. Key optimizations in the Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing program included:
- Created archival/retention process for Dataverse data
- Rightsized Dynamics 365 Sales licenses by measuring usage and optimized spend
- Increased adoption of technology and encouraged use of existing features in the platform, such as the Dynamics search engine, lead routing engine as well as integrations with Power Automate
Furthermore, Quisitive supported the company’s organizational goals by partnering with their marketing team and leveraging platforms such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Scribe, and Power Automate to generate business opportunities and create a path from leads to closing a deal. This was accomplished by modernizing the solution, giving all stakeholders the needed visibility in the sales journey, and encouraging the use of the tools.
Results
Quisitive’s Dynamics Program offers Thermon strategic guidance to continuously optimize their Dynamics Sales and Marketing environment to improve customer engagement, employee experience, and drive continuous value for the organization. Quisitive enabled the organization to benefit from a real-time picture of the account status across the enterprise through improved system integration, better-automated workflows, an improved CRM user experience, and better overall system reliability.
Thermon’s Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing capabilities will continue to adjust with the business’s needs and goals as they change, and Quisitive will continue helping them achieve their long-term goals. The Dynamics Program delivers a set of prescribed monthly activities and advisory meetings to keep companies’ systems environment healthy and secure. The next step in Thermon’s journey is to optimize the use of Dynamics 365 Marketing, a toolset intended to build meaningful relationships with customers and prospects with customer-led experiences.
Transformative Impact
- Improved licensing allocations and usage by right-sizing their Dynamics footprint
- Optimized the Sales and Marketing Dynamics environment to adjust as their business needs and goals change
- Increased completion of pipeline activity with system integrations between the ERP sales quotation, CRM, and email systems
- Improved user experience to maximize employee engagement to maintain accurate prospect/ customer data
- Stabilized system reliability to create monthly pipeline forecasting, a mission-critical business function
- Improved performance of the Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing platforms by identifying areas where bottlenecks exist
- Created a more stable platform for their sales and marketing team
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Growth and productivity within the manufacturing industry have always been driven by innovation. Historically, the introduction of the wheel, steam engines, and more recently, lean manufacturing methodologies coincided with growth spurts across the industry. However, by the turn of the new millennium global labor productivity growth was in decline and the tenets of lean manufacturing no longer did the trick.
The paradigm shift from manual processes to utilizing digital technologies has empowered manufacturers with the tools they need to capture data across the entire production process.
Discover our roadmap to boosting digital transformation and accelerating productivity in manufacturing.
About Quisitive
Quisitive is a premier, global Microsoft Partner that harnesses the Microsoft cloud platform and complementary technologies, including custom solutions and first-party offerings, to generate transformational impact for enterprise customers. Quisitive has consistently been recognized as a leading Microsoft Partner with 16 Specializations and all 6 Solution Partner Designations. Quisitive’s Microsoft awards include the 2023 US Partner of the Year Winner for Health and Life Sciences, 2023 US Partner of the Year Winner for Solutions Assessment and 2023 US Partner of the Year Finalist for the Industrial and Manufacturing vertical.
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Manual entry and physical clipboards have become a thing of the past. And for good reason. These processes are time-consuming, prone to errors, and unavailable when you need them. Reliable, real-time data has become pivotal in staying ahead of production as well as the competition.
Download the full PDF to learn more about the benefits of reliable data in manufacturing.
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In this case study:
Client: Dematic
Industry: Manufacturing
Products and Services: Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Firewall, Azure Front Door, Azure DDoS Protection, Azure API Management, Azure Web Application Firewall
Country: USA
About Dematic
Dematic helps keep the world moving. Part of the KION Group, the Atlanta-based company designs, builds, implements, and supports automated system solutions that optimize the supply chain. As it creates these customized solutions to maximize efficiency for customers, Dematic needs a robust, efficient, and flexible security solution to protect sensitive client information and services.
Delivering highly secure supply chain services
Dematic takes pride in its position as a leading supplier of integrated automated technology software and services for warehouses, distribution centers, and production facilities. It has installed more than 6,000 systems of all sizes and levels of complexity, from lower-cost manual options to fully automated systems. It has more than 7,000 employees worldwide and 60 engineering centers in 25 countries.
Since Dematic works with a wide range of customer facilities, from e-commerce and apparel to groceries and healthcare, it constantly creates customized solutions—and the security for those services—to fit customer requirements. The breadth of customization makes it challenging to standardize and scale security services like firewalls, which provide advanced threat protection for sensitive and regulated environments.
Dematic needed a security solution with flexibility, scalability, and cloud-native integration. “We have a responsibility to our customers to protect their data and processes,” says Kevin Boutin, Principal Architect at Dematic. “Trust isn’t something that happens on its own, so Dematic must proactively demonstrate a variety of mitigation efforts we take to increase security. We need the right tools to effectively demonstrate this.”
Many Dematic customers work in sectors such as government and healthcare, which require especially rigorous security to protect sensitive information. As you can see, the security stakes are high in the supply chain. A security incident for a Dematic customer could lead to a mechanical equipment failure that harms people in a warehouse or supply chain delays that cost companies millions of dollars per hour.
Cloud-native security services
Dematic knew early on that it wanted to use Microsoft Azure. Since Dematic already used Microsoft cloud-native services internally, the company wanted a cloud-native approach to security for its customer-facing services.
Microsoft created a proof of concept for Dematic, which successfully met the flexibility and scalability requirements for Dematic to deliver highly secure services to customers.
Dematic ultimately selected the Premium tier of Azure Firewall along with the Premium tier of Azure Front Door, the Standard tier of Azure DDoS Protection, Azure API Management, Azure Web Application Firewall, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
Dematic partnered with Catapult Systems, a Microsoft Gold partner with specialty certification in cloud security, to deploy the Azure security products, especially Azure Firewall Premium. Dematic also used Microsoft FastTrack in the early stage of its development cycle.
With Azure Firewall Premium features like an intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) and transport layer security (TLS) inspection, Dematic can prevent zero-day threats, malware, and viruses from spreading across networks. Dematic uses Azure Firewall Premium for IDPS, TLS inspection, and URL filtering capabilities.
Dematic uses Azure Front Door, a cloud content delivery network service that delivers high performance, scalability, and more secure user experiences. Specifically, Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF), which is attached to Azure Front Door, protects Dematic’s customer-facing web applications from web-based attacks and malicious bots. It uses Azure DDoS Protection for network protection and rapid response to denial-of-service attacks. With recommendations from Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Dematic continually strengthens the overall security posture of its environment and protects workloads from evolving threats.
“With Defender for Cloud, we can set security policies and automatically generate compliance reports for the standards that we need to meet for customers,” says Brandon Bates, Principal Architect at Dematic. “It gives Dematic and our customers peace of mind when we show that we meet security standards.”
And with Azure API Management, Dematic has a single place from which to manage APIs for security and more.
“We have centralized where our DevOps, Security Ops, and other users would go to troubleshoot anything related to deployment,” Boutin says. “Bringing all these different services into Azure makes our lives easier.”
Scalability for meeting customer needs
With Azure Firewall Premium, Dematic can easily and quickly help protect any new data conduits for customers instead of having to seek out the technical expertise needed to do so. It is just one way that Dematic uses cloud-native tools to make security easier.
“Cloud-native scaling in Azure Firewall Premium is incredibly important to us,” Boutin says. “Not only do we remove single points of failure from our architecture, but we also get high availability and uptime of 99.99 percent, which helps us meet service level agreements with our customers.”
Dematic enjoys on-demand pricing for its security tools, so it only has to pay for what it needs as it creates, tests, and releases products for customers.
“During our production cycles, we offer beta tests for sales groups and decision-makers, but we don’t want to be locked into paying for a certain amount of usage,” Bates says. “With on-demand pricing in the Azure products that we use, we only pay for what we need at any given time.”
Dematic still has the flexibility to use third-party products like Terraform, an open-source infrastructure as code software, for its deployments in Azure. Dematic uses infrastructure as code in the deployment and maintenance of security solutions, so its teams can test applications in production-like environments early in the development cycle.
A more confident security posture
Dematic is confident that its cloud-native Azure network security solutions work around the clock to help prevent and detect any security issues. Now, Dematic can focus on delivering the best services to customers instead of worrying about its security posture and the detailed day-to-day workings of a firewall.
Dematic can use its strong security posture to show new customers the multiple layers of protection in place to help keep their data more secure.
“Our expertise is in developing applications with really easy-to-use interfaces that bring together data, analytics, AI, and other innovative capabilities,” Bates says. “Understanding the inner workings of a firewall is not our expertise, and with Azure Firewall Premium, it doesn’t have to be. We use Azure Firewall Premium to protect Dematic and our customers around the clock, and we can depend on it.”
Manufacturing businesses know that margins are incredibly tight, and efficiency is paramount for an organization’s success. Even small improvements can reap huge dividends in output and profitability. Yet many manufacturers neglect an important part of their businesses: the software assets that they depend on to control and monitor them. Modernizing applications is an important step towards improvements in your production process overall. And whether you take on the challenge of modernizing your applications or not, every sign points to your competitors doing it to find the advantages in production and cost reductions.
What will modernizing applications do for you?
Many organizations regard initiatives like application modernization as an unwanted cost and put it off as long as they can. They might be missing a real opportunity. Although the modernization process might be complex and costly, the return on this investment is often extremely high.
Manufacturers who modernize their applications find significant improvements in productivity, reductions in downtime, and better use of resources. This might result from reducing the effort and cost of maintaining a suite of on-premises legacy applications. It could be from using more detailed data to better control inventory and production. Or it might be from monitoring equipment better to maintain it more effectively and thereby reduce downtime.
In fact, a recent study of the manufacturing sector worldwide by industry experts IDC found significant trends for manufacturers who were modernizing their technology assets. Manufacturers are increasingly using big data, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things (IoT) as they modernize.
IDC’s study predicts that companies in the manufacturing industry will make significant moves towards modernization in the next two to ten years, including:
- Reducing costs by digitizing production lines using IoT and machine learning
- Increasing productivity through supply chain resiliency and AI
- Addressing skills gaps using intelligent robotic process automation
- Using cloud-based innovation platforms for new products and services
- Using IOT data to treat assets as internal customers, reducing downtime by 40% and unplanned downtime by 25%
The trends are clear. The days of on-premises software and siloed applications are rapidly slipping away. Modernizing your technology will soon be not only a competitive advantage but a necessity for success in the industry.
A modernization success story
One of Quisitive’s recent clients, a leading global manufacturer of thermoplastic composite components, electrical and fiber optic connectors, and other engineered components, recently confronted this very reality. With a wide range of customers across the aerospace, industrial, medical, petrochemical, and pharmaceutical industries, they wanted to improve their manufacturing processes.
The organization engaged Quisitive in April 2020, looking for a partner that could assist with their initiative to digitize their manufacturing processes. Quisitive’s analysis identified some key needs for the company. They needed to further develop their data warehouse so that they could accurately report on the entire product manufacturing process, and they needed to use machine learning to identify outliers in sensor data.
Quisitive enacted their On-Ramp to Azure Data program to help the company move forward on meeting these needs. The solution Quisitive implemented enabled the client to consume a wide range of data, whether it was streamed or batched. Using Azure Data Factory, the company was able to integrate their existing code and migrate their data sources. Quisitive also completed knowledge transfer sessions on data integration and provided supporting Azure documentation to ensure a smooth transition for the organization.
With the assistance they received from Quisitive, the customer is now positioned to track product quality and monitor machine parameters throughout their manufacturing processes, enabling them to perform maintenance proactively and shut down production processes before a product quality issue occurs.
Modernizing applications with Quisitive
The idea of modernizing a company’s entire environment of applications can be daunting, even overwhelming. To address this, Quisitive developed its On-Ramp to Application Modernization (ORTAM) process to help clients work through their modernization. Broadly, the steps in ORTAM are:
- Identify applications and dependencies. A full inventory of the applications is created, and groups of applications are prioritized for modernization. For each application, its modernization need – rehost, refactor, rearchitect, rebuild, replace, or retire – is proposed.
- Evaluate the environment. Automated tools help to create a holistic view of the environment, including an understanding of the data, servers, databases, and code involved.
- Define modernization waves. The risks of application modernization are minimized by taking it in waves, rather than all at once. Applications are grouped into waves based on similarities in their code bases, complexity, compliance requirements, and dependencies.
- Modernize the applications. Application architects design a modern Azure environment for the small group of applications in a given wave, and develop a modernization plan and timeline for them and then execute the plan, ensuring that appropriate change controls are in place throughout.
Throughout the process, change control and communications are key to ensuring each wave of the modernization effort is a success.
Moving Forward on Modernization
Quisitive has partnered with multiple manufacturing partners to help them modernize their applications, with significant success. Our experience with application modernization, with the Azure environment, and with the manufacturing sector ensures that we can help minimize disruption, maximize effectiveness, and deliver a migration that will be cost-effective and beneficial.
Contact us to speak about modernizing applications with our experts today.
Agenda
- Current trends in manufacturing
- Impact of application modernization for manufacturing customers
- How to achieve a modernized application portfolio