One of the interesting consequences of the mass industrialization the world has undergone over the last two centuries has been a growing distance between how goods are produced and how they are consumed. Across thousands of points of innovation — from centralized, integrated manufacturing processes to expansive, high-volume global trade routes — a cumulative effect has been that consumers are rarely forced to consider the full extent of where goods come from.
Even in situations where production is on display — a chef cooking a meal in an open kitchen, for instance — it’s hard to grasp the full extent of what went into making that meal possible. The fact that we can so easily interact with the complexity of the global supply chain without thinking about it is, in fact, one of its hallmarks.
Until, that is, it stops working. One thing we have learned in recent years is that, when supply chains falter or halt, nothing could be more visible or obvious. Tim Lawrence, the Director of Digital Supply Chains at the UK industry body Digital Catapult, commented that “from empty shelves to petrol queues and driver shortages, bosses from across all industries are taking note that our brittle supply chains are no longer fit for purpose”.
Manufacturing businesses, which sit at the crux between material resources and usable goods, are at the very sharp end of these crises, and it’s not just stock issues they’re facing. Research from Citrix revealed 80 percent of IT security leaders believe that supply chain issues and delays have put their organization at increased risk from ransomware, for example, by being unable to replace unsupported hardware.
As successive waves of disruption continue to spotlight supply chain flows which should be frictionless and invisible, how can manufacturers respond?
Cloudy Definitions
Lawrence’s comment was in light of a Digital Catapult manufacturing survey in which it asked leaders in the UK market about their strategic and spending priorities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two-thirds reported that their focus was to make their supply chains more resilient, while supply crises were reported to be the main driver of business model innovation.
When asked about specific technology investments, however, cloud topped the list with 67 percent of respondents stating that it is a priority — well ahead of more manufacturing-specific areas like robotics (56 percent) or additive manufacturing (46 percent). All of which raises the question of what, exactly, the connection is between cloud adoption and supply chain resilience might be.
For many businesses, the driving factor behind cloud adoption, above and beyond the efficiencies it offers, is the need for agility. Because cloud infrastructure eliminates certain barriers and speedbumps, like the capital cost of standing up servers to meet growing demand for services, or the time required to establish a presence in new geolocations, it offers the ability to make decisions and change direction much more quickly. This ability to scale up and down when needed has proven vital in a volatile market context: the shift to remote working during the pandemic is just one dramatic example of this, as well as being able to cope with seasonal demands.
Vitally, then, cloud agility works precisely because it changes the extent to which businesses must actively engage with how, where, and when their digital workloads are running. Just like the global supply chain (when it is running well), cloud strategies make complexity invisible and frictionless so that businesses can focus on products and services, not on establishing the processes which enable them.
The Agile Manufacturer
Here, we can start to see the link between cloud enablement and responsiveness to supply chain disruption. While the underlying reality of a manufacturing process is obviously very different to a consumer app or B2B professional services, manufacturers are now seeking the same agility which those sectors now enjoy through digitalization.
The route forward, then, will be in finding innovative ways to bring the very material processes of manufacturing into line with the flexibility of digital processes. Perhaps the clearest starting point for this work is in how the workforce is enabled: while the physical plants manufacturers operate are immovable, the human skills and experience needed to operate them are now highly portable.
Adapting a facility to shift the raw materials being supplied to it, for instance, can be a time-consuming, highly specialized task which relies on access to high-end, onsite workstations. By virtualizing those management systems and implementing tools which give deeper insight into operations, global teams can collaborate on local issues to resolve them and return the facility to productivity more quickly. In turn, this also enables a centralized approach to some parts of the operations, resulting in greater visibility across the board.
Likewise, part of the brittleness which Lawrence describes lies in range and complexity of third-party relationships which modern manufacturing relies on. When disruptions force changes to these supply chains, physically testing the compatibility of new arrangements can be a time-consuming process which keeps products from the market. With secure ways of sharing information between parties and technologies like 3D visualization, these timescales can be significantly accelerated.
These are just two examples among many; ultimately, as with the cloud in other sectors, new and unexpected use-cases will emerge as adoption deepens. It’s a kind of agility which, in an unpredictable supply chain context, manufacturers must pursue — and it all starts with expanding the role of IT around the physical production process.
Learn about Citrix’s solutions for manufacturing IT and how they can provide globally disbursed R&D, plant floor and distribution teams with secure access to the information required to speed time to market.
