To address these challenges and help manufacturers work towards digital maturity, we are announcing manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, and copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI, available in private preview. These solutions enable manufacturers to:

• Ingest and unify data directly from diverse sources across the factory ecosystem. 
• Standardize and enrich data according to the International Society of Automation (ISA-95) model for seamless interoperability.  
• Utilize custom copilots for querying data through conversational interfaces. 

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Optimize production with manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Manufacturing data solutions in Fabric allows users to maximize the value of factory data and uncover operational insights for production optimization. This is accomplished by unifying information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) data into an open and secure data platform. Organizations can realize further benefits by getting manufacturing data ready for AI by enriching it with semantic context that follows an industry standard ISA-95 information model. 

Fabric enables customers to accelerate time to insight generation by unifying, enriching, and modeling manufacturing data in Fabric. The solution ingests data from a variety of sources such as factory-domain data from sensors, systems of record like manufacturing execution system (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), and industrial automation applications. The data is then stored on Microsoft Fabric One Lake for unification, enrichment, modeling, and aggregation. This unified data provides a scalable and repeatable pattern to tackle all factory-domain data projects, accelerating the pace of innovation, freeing up IT resources, and maximizing the value of an organization’s technology investments. 

Customers can extract the full value of their factory data and existing manufacturing solutions landscape using manufacturing data solutions in Fabric. For example, a production supervisor conducting a root cause analysis to determine a correlation between material batches, machine utilization, and quality issues might spend weeks manually aggregating data from several systems and require IT support. With manufacturing data solutions in Fabric, the supervisor has quick access to contextualized data for analysis, completing it in hours instead of weeks. This saves valuable time and immediately provides insights that increase agility and innovation.  

Increase agility with copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI

Creating a unified data lake with manufacturing data solutions in Fabric is essential to optimize AI capabilities. Copilots can enhance responsiveness and streamline communication across teams and roles. We are building an industry-specific augmentation loop to help partners and customers use the Microsoft Copilot stack more quickly with out-of-the-box prompt templates, connectors, and skills all packaged as a standard plugin. Customers can then use natural language to get timely and accurate data from complex systems like MES, quality management system (QMS), and supply planning with minimal effort.  

With copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI, a production supervisor for example, can open a custom chatbot and quickly query the data in a conversational way and identify quality issues in minutes instead of hours. The copilot template is a managed application in the customer-tenant, offering organizations full visibility and control of their data. The template features the latest Microsoft technologies such as Azure AI models, Semantic Kernel, and Azure Cognitive Search, and is extended through the Microsoft third-party independent software vendor (ISV) ecosystem. 

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing Partner ecosystem

Microsoft’s partner ecosystem with its deep industry expertise extends Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing offerings. Systems integrators and ISVs are enabling factory data ingestion from different systems by building custom or proprietary connectors into Fabric: embedding the solution capabilities into their applications or building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Azure AI. 

Accenture and Avanade—Manufacturing data solutions in Fabric and copilot template on Azure AI 

Empowering customers to unlock the full potential of their factory data, Accenture and Avanade collaborated on the development of the Avanade Manufacturing copilot, powered by manufacturing data solutions in Fabric, which facilitates innovation, operational efficiency, and data-driven decision-making. By leveraging data from various sources, such as MES, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), sensors, and ERP, the copilot enables seamless querying and generation of insights in natural language for factory workers.  

As leading global system integrators and trusted private preview implementation partners for Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, Accenture and Avanade are spearheading the delivery of manufacturing data solutions and copilot templates. With expertise in integrating key Microsoft technologies, like Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service, and collaborating across the broader ISV ecosystem, Accenture and Avanade stand at the forefront of driving digital transformation in the manufacturing sector. 

“Avanade Manufacturing copilot, powered by manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, can help AI systems understand data from diverse OT-IT systems that manage complex manufacturing supply chains, processes, equipment, and product ranges in near real-time. With our graph-of-graphs approach to knowledge management and the open ISA-95 standard, we’re able to supercharge the ask-an-expert capabilities of Microsoft Copilot. This is vital in an era of labor and skills shortages, rising production targets, and the need to cut costs and carbon emissions.”

—Brendan Mislin, General Manager, Avanade Industry X

To learn more about Accenture and Avanade Manufacturing copilot offerings, visit their AppSource page. 

Sight Machine Manufacturing Data Platform and Factory CoPilot on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform (MDP) helps global manufacturers unlock the power of industrial data to increase profitability, productivity, and sustainability. Sight Machine makes it easy to integrate contextualized production data in Fabric. With its data and analytics tools, Sight Machine’s MDP enables companies to combine and analyze contextualized manufacturing data with financial, supply chain, ERP, and MES data. This allows for unprecedented levels of knowledge and enterprise-wide insight. Sight Machine’s Factory CoPilot leverages Microsoft factory operations copilot template on Azure AI to provide conversational querying of the data within the UI of the Factory CoPilot. This enables plant managers and quality engineers to interact with the data to uncover insights faster and accelerate issue resolution.  

“Until now, industrial companies have been unable to incorporate their manufacturing data as a full citizen of their data estates. With Sight Machine on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, companies can optimize production scheduling globally, determine which equipment is best at fulfilling an order, know which lines are at highest risk of going down, see the status of orders, and determine when to re-route them to another facility. It has never been possible to do this in a truly data-driven way.”

—Jon Sobel, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Sight Machine 

Learn more about Sight Machine solutions on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, visit the Azure Marketplace.

Litmus Automation connector

In the dynamic landscape of industrial operations, Litmus stands at the forefront of data management, offering an advanced DataOps platform that seamlessly operates at the edge. With the ability to swiftly extract, normalize, and model data along with metadata, Litmus Edge empowers enterprises with edge data expertise. Paired with manufacturing data solution in Fabric, this collaboration pioneers a transformative approach, enabling the establishment of a robust hybrid edge-to-cloud infrastructure. From streamlining real-time machine dashboards to facilitating advanced machine learning, the synergy between Litmus and manufacturing data solutions in Fabric unlocks unprecedented efficiency and innovation, seamlessly bridging the gap between edge and cloud.

To learn more about Litmus solutions on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, visit the Azure Marketplace.

AVEVA Connect Industrial Intelligence Platform, integrated with Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

AVEVA is collaborating with Microsoft on extending AVEVA’s Industrial AI Assistant to showcase how generative AI enhances supply chain production planning and plant floor production. It helps with scheduling, improving operational efficiency, and decision making in plants and across the supply chain. Using AVEVA’s Industrial Intelligence Platform, CONNECT, and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, AVEVA unifies and contextualizes production execution data and supply chain production planning data in Fabric. AVEVA’s Industrial AI Assistant provides a seamless conversational experience, through a copilot template on Azure AI, that empowers plant floor and supply chain employees with valuable insights to resolve issues and accelerate decision-making activities. 

CONNECT unifies an organization’s industrial ecosystem in a single, secure platform—helping users do more with industrial data, driving digital transformation in real time with powerful intelligence and robust insights. 

Users can easily access software as a service (SaaS) capability through CONNECT to create an industrial hybrid architecture that offers the robustness of on-premises industrial applications with the scale and accessibility of cloud. With CONNECT, companies can engineer smarter and operate better with an open and neutral industrial cloud platform. Organizations can promote sustainable growth by achieving transformation faster, reducing costs, and optimizing at scale. Lastly, manufacturers can connect their business to their ecosystem of partners and accelerate time to value using proven industrial expertise. 

Rockwell Automation’s Plex on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Rockwell is collaborating with Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing to introduce natural language copilot experiences within Plex. These innovations aim to streamline quality issue resolution through corrective actions and root cause analysis.  

Corrective action teams often struggle with accessing the correct data and determining root cause. With today’s high workforce attrition, the ability to generate insights and share knowledge about a problem or process is also key. Leveraging Microsoft AI capabilities, Rockwell’s Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform will accelerate the resolution of customer complaints by swiftly identifying root causes and accessing critical data for corrective actions.  

Stay tuned as Rockwell and Microsoft drive innovation in quality management for manufacturing. 

“With the integration of Rockwell’s Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform with FactoryTalk DataMosaix and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, customers will benefit from transformative AI tools that help drive productivity, safety, and quality.”

—Anthony Murphy, Vice President, Product Management

Learn more at Hannover Messe 2024

Discover more about manufacturing data solutions in Fabric during a live demonstration at Hanover Messe in April 2024.  

The post Optimizing factory operations with Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Financial markets are changing rapidly, creating new challenges and opportunities for all participants. For our customers, there is demand for the right data at the right time with reduced complexity and increased flexibility. LSEG’s comprehensive data and analytics and Microsoft’s trusted and secure global cloud platform and AI capabilities enable us to co-innovate solutions for the financial markets eco-system. These innovations will evolve how customers gain value from their data to unlock opportunities by combining LSEG’s data and content sources in Microsoft Fabric, integrated into the enterprise-wide data catalog and governance framework of Microsoft Purview.

Innovating to meet customer needs 

Analytics and modeling are now critical to success as the increasing demand for diverse data fuels business decisions and drives the need for a simplified approach that meets business needs. In addition, as regulations become more quantitative, it has created substantial challenges in terms of lost time and capital for customers who don’t have the necessary data and analytics infrastructure in place.   

Historically, Microsoft provided our horizontal cloud platforms to our customers such as solutions for developers—Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams, notably among them—while LSEG separately delivered financial market infrastructure, data, and analytics. The burden largely fell on our mutual customers to map those building blocks to their business problems and to bring these assets together in a coherent way. That forced our customers to bear the cost and complexity of this integration. 

With our partnership, we seek to help our customers climb the value chain by bringing these complementary assets together. We will transform financial services workflows to help finance and investment professionals improve decisions, communications, and productivity while maintaining regulatory compliance. Together we will offer customers a simpler and more connected solution with:   

• Cloud-based data architecture that consolidates LSEG datasets on one, flexible infrastructure that is simple, responsive, and efficient, and built to meet the data needs of the enterprise. 
• Cloud analytics and modeling services built on Microsoft Azure Machine Learning. 
• A comprehensive security approach enabling preventative and detective controls to meet the security, privacy, and compliance needs of this regulated industry.

Customers will be able to use the combination of Microsoft Fabric powered by LSEG data, analytics, and data management capabilities to enhance their workflow and bring greater efficiency and productivity to their organizations. To bring that to life, you can see in this workflow illustration how LSEG and Microsoft’s collaboration will drive significant productivity by simplifying the whole process of finding, managing, and distributing massive content sets.  

Speaking about enhancing productivity, we also discussed how the LSEG-Microsoft partnership will evolve the customer experience at-scale across global financial markets to deliver the most advanced, easily accessible financial data and insights through: 

• A single point of access to financial markets data that reduces time and cost for financial institutions to discover, integrate, manage, share, and derive insights from petabytes of financial and alternative data. 
• Intelligent analytics solutions that reduce the time and cost for creating, distributing, and running complex analytic models across APIs and through the Microsoft productivity suite. 
• An integrated financial services workspace that empowers customers to make informed decisions with confidence and greater speed through seamless workflows and increased productivity. 

The uniqueness of this partnership is in LSEG’s data and analytics, coupled with the Microsoft cloud platform, data platform, and Microsoft 365 collaboration suite. In this way, we meet customers where they are, while creating vertical industry value. Unifying data with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services can make data and analytics much easier to discover and use—whether that is finding pricing analytics in Excel, connecting with counterparties through Microsoft Teams, or using Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft productivity apps to access LSEG financial markets data. Together, we will benefit customers by increasing productivity while offering greater efficiency, resilience, and scalability across all workflows. 

Moving ahead with generative AI 

The benefits of AI and machine learning have accelerated the rate of change in financial innovation enabling frictionless customer experiences, empowering employees to apply their creativity and talent rather than focusing on tedious work while enabling deeper insights to drive better decisions.

AI enables technology to understand and speak the language of industry. Generative AI will enable organizations to better take advantage of technology, collapsing data barriers and decoding the complex landscape of macroeconomics, markets, and regulations. 

“Microsoft AI improves the way we work, and we are making AI tools a better fit for financial services. We are combining Microsoft’s dependable and scalable infrastructure with the breadth and depth of LSEG’s trusted high-quality data and IP safeguards. Together we are shaping a future where technology supercharges our customers’ workflows and insights reliably, effectively, and responsibly.“

—Dmitri Sedov, Global Group Head, LSEG Data Intelligence. 

Microsoft AI tools are making work easier, and LSEG is making AI more valuable to financial services. AI is only as good as the quality of the data it consumes. LSEG brings a unique capability to demonstrate data trust with a breadth and depth of aggregated, cleaned, and codified financial markets data as well as extensive data management knowledge and understanding of what regulators and the world’s largest financial institutions need. These capabilities sit alongside Microsoft’s Responsible AI commitments, including our recently announced Copilot Copyright Commitment to protect our customers from copyright claims arising from their use of our copilots.

The benefit of AI for customers and clients will be in how quickly and easily they can access the right data to generate insights with AI that are both reliable and relevant to the task at hand.

Microsoft Fabric and the embedded generative AI capabilities in Fabric present another great transformation for financial services. Microsoft Fabric will be the cornerstone of LSEG’s Data Platform, and their financial markets intelligence will help enable the financial markets ecosystem to leverage generative AI and other capabilities. We will also use AI to address the data discoverability challenge itself by using AI models to better understand user preferences, predictively surfacing relevant data, and categorizing vast datasets into intuitive segments. All of LSEG’s data available through Microsoft Fabric will also be published in Microsoft Purview, enabling this data to be discovered in the enterprise data catalog and governed centrally alongside other proprietary and commercially acquired data sets.

LSEG’s quantitative and engineering talent and proven ability to provide the right data for the financial services community bring the credible expertise needed to ensure generative AI provides the optimal yet secure experience for our customers. There is a profound opportunity for our customers to unlock new value and we are excited to deliver this value together with LSEG. 

Discover more

• Discover Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.
• Learn more about Microsoft perspectives on the era of generative AI: 
  • The era of generative AI: Driving transformation in banking 
  • The era of generative AI: Driving transformation in insurance 

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The post The era of generative AI: Driving transformation in financial services appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

We continue to invest in improvements to Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services that help financial institutions better manage their data at scale and use it to improve customer experience, coordinate engagement, and drive operational efficiency. These include a new onboarding application, unified client profile for wealth management, new data models, and intelligent appointments, first announced by my colleague Bill Borden.

Building on our platform are new offerings from our ecosystem of industry partners, including independent software vendors (ISVs), Thought Machine and Mambu, that are integrating their banking cores with the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. Argano’s CX Connect for Financial Services bridges the siloed technical islands of data into a single pane of glass for customers. Bambu and Wealth Dynamix have solutions in the market for wealth management and ASC Recording Insights and BioCatch offer solutions for compliance. For an in-depth look at our partners and their solutions, read the latest from Toby Bowers.

I’m excited to provide an overview of some key features from this release that will have immediate impact for our customers as well as show them in action.

Improving the customer journey

Intelligent appointments

Customers appreciate 24/7 access to their data as well as the ability to communicate and schedule time with advisors. Intelligent appointments provide customers a self-service experience to book time with an advisor. Financial institutions can offer flexibility by allowing the customer to choose how and when they want to meet with their financial service provider.

The scheduling experience easily and quickly matches the availability, relevance, and skills of the customer’s financial needs advisor. Scheduled meetings are automatically synchronized to participants’ calendars. Customers are also informed about appointments through SMS and email to streamline the process and ensure relevant materials are prepared ahead of time.

Onboarding application

From onboarding to retention, customers expect their financial service journey to be a connected and efficient process. Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services provides new in-market solutions to improve communication and equips representatives with pertinent customer details to streamline service.

The onboarding application (preview United States and the United Kingdom only), enables financial institutions to orchestrate financial onboarding processes through a transparent and flexible experience. It allows for customized data collection tasks per business scenario and defines the application document journey. Visual user interface components consolidate and help users visualize the onboarding process. With access to primary applicant details, additional parties’ details, and application task summaries, financial advisors can more effectively engage with customers. Additionally, the document verification process can be accelerated and automated by incorporating document intelligence AI analysis to verify all onboarding application documents.

Extending to additional verticals with new data models

The wealth management and property and casualty insurance data models (preview in the United States and the United Kingdom only) are both standalone options for partners and Microsoft Dataverse customers to extend Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services solutions. The small business data model is an extension to the retail banking data model. These data models help financial institutions quickly take advantage of the benefits of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and accelerate time to value. These out-of-the-box components are also aligned with Azure Synapse Database templates, offering financial institutions and partners an even greater opportunity to bring innovative experiences to their customers.

Providing a unified client profile

Financial advisors seek to offer personalized investment guidance to their clients based on a deep understanding of their needs and goals. The unified client profile for wealth management (preview in the United States and the United Kingdom only) provides a 360-degree view of the client, offering insightful, easily consumed data to help drive more productive client-advisor conversations and better outcomes. A high-level summary view provides client details, life moments, investment portfolio, financial holdings, and household finances and allows the manager to create client connection groups. Managers can easily capture relationships between contacts based on an expandable option set.

The client snapshot provides an at-a-glance view of the customer, with key information to start a conversation in the customer’s preferred communication channel. For a more comprehensive view, financial goals can be added to life events, helping wealth managers to assess appropriate and relevant financial advice. Wealth advisors also have access to their client’s investment portfolios allowing them to better understand the ownership structure, value, performance, and allocation by asset type.

Compliance program and new markets

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services now offers the full value of the Compliance Program (generally available) for Microsoft Cloud, providing customers with white-glove support for risk, audit, and compliance challenges. Organizations can connect with subject matter experts for support in understanding risk to help accelerate cloud adoption. This program has exclusive features such as ask an expert, risk and control mapping, a compliance community, and proactive risk assurance.

We are also expanding to Brazil, Hong Kong, and Singapore with the addition of Brazilian, Portuguese, and traditional Chinese to our list of supported languages. Learn more about our current list of countries and supported languages.

Learn more

To learn more and stay informed, visit our Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services website. Find the latest on current release plans at Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services | Microsoft Learn.

The post Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services: Create new value with deeper customer connections appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.