“Managed Services” in the Cloud provides an acceleration Opportunity for Small Industrial/ Manufacturing Business

Last two weeks again a significant amount of my time has been in discussions and strategy around the “hosted managed services” and the real opportunity vs speculation. The discussion continues to grow more people participating with a clear outcome of the discussion on the significant new opportunity these managed services deliver to Small Business, Small sites.   The discussion is happening in larger companies, they are accessing how to use the services, and off premise capability.

Early adoption of managed services will be the small business that do not have limited IT resources, who are also having to grapple with the changing consumer of the market, who need access to industrial information traditionally only for the control rooms, or customized databases.

The Small Business companies are just jumping on the new opportunities the cloud based managed services offer, bringing significant new capabilities quickly to their business that would traditionally be out of their reach due to cost and expertise. Initially in the back office applications such as CRM, ERP and MS Office capability, providing an experience of what advantage, and understanding of the security risk vs. Reward. Now they looking at the new services coming on line for the operational execution management increasing real-time control of inventory, and production order tracking and execution.

Adopting  “Managed Services” built in experience of product and domain experts, with many practices and capabilities, but they do not require a tender/ RFP, they are ready, yes there is a compromise in some customization, but that sacrifice is low compared to advantage to adopting the capability in its predefined format. Providing a platform for faster decisions and agility to serve the markets, expand with small loosely coupled faculties that can capture new market by reacting faster to market changes. The discussion of smaller facilities strategically situated for markets, but this network of value assets (sites) now can execute in an aligned manner, through a common set of “operational managed Services” hosted in the cloud.

A clear understanding of inventory across the sites, the status of orders, the status of the plant, from one central operational system, interacting from each site. For many of these small sites the operational execution is a highly manual (forms) driven process, so the ability to have a set of handheld devices, and desktop devices connected to the cloud enabling proven operational process execution is not a substantial step.

The value in return is significant, delivering them and efficiency in operational execution consistency, control and awareness only previously achievable with significant project investment, and expertise. We will see an explosion in the amount of these “Managed Services” for the industrial / manufacturing sector come to market, key will be how well developed and architected the services are. They have a 90% reproducibility across sites, to provide the speed to up and running. Early adopters needs make sure they confirm:

·         That the solution is built on standard, proven industrial products.

·         That the solution is tested and is 90% reusable across sites so the domain is managed as a product not an application, so will scale, and evolve across 100s of customers.