Connect products and services

External forces like cyber risk, sustainability and complex regulations force companies to transform how they manufacture products, as well as create unique business models that cater to today’s connected customer.

Businesses previously designed, built, produced and shipped products that customers bought, concluding the cycle. It wasn’t common practice to center the entire manufacturing process around the customer and support an ongoing relationship. Now, organizations are building in continuous feedback loops – sensors in products and customer feedback from various channels. The cloud and big data allow for a greater opportunity to improve customer connections and really differentiate your organization by doing things like listening to customer sentiment, analyzing usage and determining quality.

Digitize your Production

With the convergence of physical and digital, many manufacturing companies are embracing digital transformation. Many manufacturers believe that achieving end-to-end real-time monitoring is key to improving business process, but despite investments made, only 7% of manufacturers have achieved real-time monitoring across the entire manufacturing process. The results for those who have successfully implemented smart, connected factories are extremely powerful with average realized productivity gains of 17-20%.

Digital transformation is about applying technologies to radically change traditional processes, products and services into data-driven, connected solutions that can be monetized through efficiency gains and new business models. This digital-first approach allows acceleration time to market and provides new customer value. Finding an approach that fits your business is critical, as there is no one-size-fits all.

Consider these three foundational guidelines to set your organization on a course that make sense:

• Build a vision for your digital transformation journey
• Develop a holistic and realistic strategy
• Identify a partner with industry experience required to deliver the change you need

Develop a strategy to match your objectives

Three key considerations that are easy to overlook, but important to evaluate include finding the relationship between your strategy and technology, prioritizing agility to contribute to longer-term success and the unique requirements for your industry and vertical.

Avoid going it alone

Transformation efforts grounded in industry and vertical expertise are more likely to result in better solutions. The partner you choose should have knowledge of your objectives and scope, a deep understanding of the technology being used as well as strong experience helping others with similar initiatives. They should be able to help you think through the entire digital transformation journey as well as assisting with full execution of that vision.

Find out how Microsoft services can help you drive transformative change while minimizing you risk by reach out to us on our social channels:  Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook 

Learn more: A Strategic Approach to Digital Transformation in Manufacturing Industries

The post Enabling Transformation for the Factory of the Future appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Tamper-proof digital technology

Blockchain can record every transaction, production step and sale of a product on a decentralized platform making it immediately available at each step. This type of distributed ledger maintains a permanent record of transactional data. It functions as a database managed by computers belonging to a peer-to-peer network. All copies of the ledger are updated and validated simultaneously, preventing a single point of failure. This leads to smarter supply chains, enabling firms to track the progress of materials and payments as goods travel around the globe.

How can it support your Supply Chain?

Supply Chain automation is a huge opportunity associated with blockchain because of the decentralized processes associated with sourcing, manufacturing, shipping and paying for goods.
Accurate data enables companies to maximize efficiencies across their supply chain, boosting profit, speeding delivery and reducing cost for themselves as well as their customers. Benefits to your organization include:

• Single source of information: Info about a product is available to all parties in the supply chain
• Accurate data throughout network: Avoid sharing docs via email or cloud applications
• Data protection: Blockchain cryptography requires anyone accessing data to have correct token

Deciding where to start

Sometimes, identifying the challenges blockchain might potentially address is a logical starting point. Consider which business network participants are involved, as well as their roles in the project.  Map out the network of participants to understand their interlinked roles within the blockchain.
Understanding which assets are being transferred across the business network as well as the information associated with each one is fundamental to understanding the workflow as it crosses the business network, establishing the relevance of the blockchain. Make note of what legacy systems are involved, and how blockchain can integrate with these.

Microsoft Services can help you assess the value of blockchain to your business and deliver a proof of value with the right solution for you to solve your business challenges. Take advantage and learn how to use the Blockchain Technology to simplify and transform your current processes and find the right set of Blockchain and cloud-related technologies to solve for your business challenges.

The post Blockchain is shaking up the Supply Chain appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Improving the end user experience with the IT service organization while reducing effort and increasing security is key.  IT is evolving and adapting, becoming more agile to get things done quicker, and working in an environment that empowers and enables users to do more. IT modernization helps your organization deliver the necessary levels of security, functionality and efficiency required to keep employees productive in role – allowing you to deliver better products and services.

Microsoft helps customers transition and manage risk in a smart way by taking advantage of the cloud and modern IT, using tools and capabilities to bring that design point to your existing investments.  As you evolve your Modern IT journey, we recommend focusing on ITSM, DevOps, Win10 and Cybersecurity.

The Modern Service Management Approach

This is geared at making ITSM relevant in a cloud world. Service management experts should be focused on the most important outcomes that evolve customers from legacy traditional IT models to easier, more efficient, cost effective and agile service structures. Modern Apps and cloud services are released to end users and developers in a rapid and agile manner, which requires more facilitation of self-governance and the framework that enables coordination vs enforcement.  Your IT service delivery and support capabilities need to evolve, changing how you govern, operate and support cloud services. Modern ITSM embodies this new strategy, empowering DevOps and end users by allowing free movement in a coordinated, self-governed fashion.

DevOps – Uniting People, Process and Products

DevOps practices are essential to deliver better software faster with less cost. Companies continually strive to maintain a competitive edge and customers expect more frequent deliveries. Re-align your business to digitally transform and enable app innovation. It’s common for IT challenges to arise with extreme pressure on Ops team to configure and provision apps and infrastructure as quickly so that Dev teams can test and release new code. Your company requires a development platform for modern software development teams that includes:

• Any developer, any language, any platform
• Secure yet flexible
• Agile for the Enterprise
• Quality at the Center

Enable Productivity with Windows 10

With the mobile device explosion and harnessing the power of the cloud, Windows 10 is integrated for simplicity and provides intelligent security to defend against advanced threats. Windows 10 enables users to be productive on any device encouraging employees to innovate, create, and ultimately deliver business value. It’s also easy to deploy, manage, always up to date, and harnesses the power of the cloud including proactive insights.

Address the Modern Security Threat

While the attack surface has broadened, attacks have also become more sophisticated and more damaging. Security leaders must balance these challenges with businesses needs to collaborate, innovate, and grow. Embracing an always-on and multifaceted approach to security that protects all endpoints, detects early signs of a breach, and responds before that threat can cause damage is critical.

The post Navigating your Roadmap to IT Modernization appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

While the private sector has been making great strides towards utilizing cloud presence to digitally transform their organizations, many government Departments (federal, provincial and municipal) have been moving more slowly.  Although the drivers to move to the cloud and digitally transform are different in the public sector, they are still very real.

Realize the benefits

While reduced infrastructure costs are what attracted early adopters of cloud, surveys now show that factors such as greater scalability, higher availability and shorter time-to-solution are just as significant if not more. A Cloud strategy will allow your department to determine which benefits of the Cloud are most important in transforming the delivery of your programs.

The traditional approach to automating and transforming program delivery has been to undertake large, monolithic, multi-year programs requiring expensive, dedicated infrastructure that takes months to deploy.  This approach has an unacceptably high failure rate. The Cloud allows you, in some cases in partnership with your shared IT services provider, to provision infrastructure in minutes, not weeks, and pay only for the capacity you actually use. This enables you to work with the business on innovative changes to program delivery in an agile, iterative manner.  Experiment with new ways of doing things with small, integrated business and IT teams, and progressively learn and evolve solutions.

Harness the Data Explosion

Significant improvements to digital program delivery require a Cloud strategy.  Your objectives likely include one or more of the following:

• Assessing public sentiment from social media
• Drawing intelligence from “open source” data published by numerous providers on the Internet, from paid subscription sources, or from your own internal systems
• Managing critical program data such as health care information collaboratively with citizens and with key stakeholders (in the case of health care these would include doctors, hospitals/clinics, pharmacies, patients, etc.)
• Combining insights from data stored in multiple formats, including structured data stored in relational or non-relational databases, documents/text, flat files, flat files, XML, tec.

The Cloud facilitates all of the above.  It provides virtually limitless low-cost storage, predictive analytics and machine learning (available on a scale not possible on premises) and secure storage of even the most sensitive data. Microsoft’s cloud carries numerous industry and government certifications which attest to its ability to ensure data integrity and availability. These capabilities allow you to collect, store, analyze and share large volumes of data from multiple sources to produce actionable insights, deep analysis, and better decision-making, thereby improving your program delivery.

Develop your Cloud Strategy with Microsoft Services

Achieving the above requires a disciplined approach. The first step is developing a Cloud Strategy that will address the following:

• Your department’s business objectives
• The workloads/applications you will deploy, including prioritization of IaaS, PaaS or SaaS
• Changes needed to your core IT processes to accommodate workloads in the Cloud
• The role of your shared IT services provider as a broker of cloud services(in some cases)

Microsoft Services can help you formulate your Cloud strategy as a firm foundation on which to build as you move to the Cloud.  This strategy will be agnostic with respect to who you eventually chose to be the provider of your Cloud services.

Proven Government Digital Transformation Success

Learn more about government digital transformation success in these eBook articles featuring actual experiences of government agencies working through their digital transformation with the help of the Microsoft Cloud.

• Optimize the cost and operating efficiency of government with flexible solutions to harness the transformational power of the cloud –  link
• Transform and harness the data explosion to digitize government processes and services for increased efficiency – link

Contact us to get started

If you are a Provincial or Municipal Department CIO and would like to develop a Cloud Strategy, reach out to us on social media: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

The post Public Sector CIOs: Here’s why you Need a Cloud Strategy appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.