Shift management, logistics, maintenance scheduling or inventory management – automation has become the backbone of generating operational efficiencies in manufacturing. Mostly because Industry 4.0 helped drive digital transformation.

This gave manufacturers a way to gain a competitive advantage by using technology to streamline their operations. It advanced processes, built systems, and established a strong foundation. As a result, manufacturers have become very efficient at managing what’s in their control.

But as they’ve learned in recent years, this is not always enough to keep ahead. Especially when the biggest disruptions come from areas that they have little control over – global events, policy changes, new legislation, even consumer preferences.

Now there’s a new priority emerging: How to become more resilient so that global disruptions are less disruptive of growth. The question is: How can technology help and what is the role of the cloud and automation in achieving this?

Look at how technology is advancing and you’ll get some clues. Digital twins, extended reality (XR), and generative AI are leading trends in all industries and cloud technologies and automation are at the heart of all of them. It’s also what will help enable greater resilience in manufacturing.

Generative AI

This requires large computing capacity and the cloud provides a scalable solution for expanding or reducing capacity as needed. Manufacturers looking for efficiencies are focusing on small gains knowing that they all add up. Gen AI is being integrated in operations management to monitor systems for anything outside of the norm – excess heat, slowed operations, spillages are all indicators of inefficiencies as well as opportunities for improvements. Improving maintenance is one advantage, but more beneficial is having the data so that improvements made can be benchmarked and measured for operational gains and costs saved.

Extended Reality (XR)

Industry 5.0 is about bringing humans back into the equation of automation to enhance operations. XR has an important role to play in staff training as well as redesigning systems. It’s a major advantage to be able to visualize new methods of operation. When combined with human insight it can help identify further areas for improvement and cost savings.

Digital Twins

Those is tech love experimentation, but in the world of manufacturing where operational down time costs, digital twins offer a better alternative. Consider a manufacturer is looking for waste to reduce waste materials. But setting up a virtual model of a process that can run different solutions and scenarios to identify which one will have the best outcome.

Achieving resilience in operations is about manufacturers tapping into technology, leveraging cloud infrastructure to be able to scale up or down as needed, and automating processes to continually improve operations. As other technologies evolve, cloud computing and automation will remain at the centre of it all.