3 Ways SaaS Can Transform Your Business

From accelerating innovation to streamlining operations and more, SaaS in the cloud can have an incredible impact on manufacturing.

Over the last five years, Information Technology (IT) has moved rapidly to the cloud. In fact, 45% of IT spending is expected to shift to the cloud by 2024 according to Gartner – and Operational Technology (OT) is next.

What could this look like? Imagine simulating the design of a new product or process before investing the resources required to design, commission and optimize production. Consider the possibilities of being able to support customer equipment in a moment’s notice from anywhere, eliminating the need for costly travel. And this is only the beginning.

From accelerating innovation and improving scalability to increasing agility, streamlining operations, and reducing costs, Software as a Service (SaaS) in the cloud has the potential to transform your business.

1. Simplify How You Work

The work you do is complex, but the way you manage it doesn’t have to be. SaaS in the cloud can help simplify the way you do business.

The cloud enables on-demand scaling, making it easier than ever to add or remove users and compute power. Not only this, but with SaaS, your employees will always have access to the latest versions of your software, without a dependency on IT for installation and maintenance. Plus, as you expand software and applications in the cloud, you can reduce hardware and software capital expenses.

While the cloud in manufacturing is not meant to completely replace on-premise software, hardware, and physical access, it provides new capabilities that expand upon your existing systems to create efficiencies, improve collaboration, and more.

2. Level Up Your Innovation

Innovation is the way to meet evolving customer needs and stay ahead of the competition. With SaaS in the cloud, you can have your own digital lab at your fingertips to run testing and solve production challenges without the risks and costs of conducting these activities in the real world.

Think of what you could accomplish with the ability to collaborate with ease, try new things quicker and at a lower cost, all while reducing the impact on existing production. SaaS in the cloud not only makes this possible, but also brings it within reach.

And with better data quality, increased computing power to correlate bigger data sets, and a single digital thread across the industrial lifecycle, there is significant potential for optimizing operations and taking future design iterations to the next level.

3. Reimagine How You Support Systems

The cloud makes it possible to manage systems and equipment from anywhere and at any time. With this level of accessibility, you can manage, configure, and initiate connections to deployed equipment in a moment’s notice.

Being able to respond to production needs sooner means you can find solutions quicker and doing so remotely means that you don’t have the costly travel time and expenses. Routine cloud-enabled remote maintenance makes the likelihood of emergencies even lower. But it doesn’t end there – this level of remote connectivity in the cloud can mean even bigger things for the future, including a more proactive model of support.

Data from the plant floor can drive decisions to improve productivity automatically. With context from the design, operational information can be used to predict and help prevent unexpected downtime and make operations more efficient while they are running.

This amounts to less downtime, increased productivity, and operational efficiencies to minimize waste, promote higher yield, and more. Which is especially beneficial for your operations that are the furthest away.

SaaS Products to Help You Design and Transform with Confidence

These benefits of SaaS in the cloud are reshaping the future of automation software – a key consideration for us as we developed the FactoryTalk® Hub™ in partnership with Microsoft on the Azure platform. What we've learned along the way is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel to find the best solutions. Instead, we’ve applied proven technologies from other industries, modified and adapted them, and added our own learnings to create unique and immediate value for production environments.

We are in the final stages of delivering FactoryTalk® Design Studio™, a new, cloud-native application entry to the FactoryTalk Hub suite. Beginning with controller programming, it will provide a modern design environment with multi-controller project support, and on-demand solutions that will simplify the way people collaborate on systems. We’ve incorporated modern software development methodologies into familiar automation software functions, providing an unprecedented level of flexibility.

• Design Flexibility: Some control system programmers like to use graphical editors for ladder and function block programming, which are intuitive for maintenance staff to use. However, there are also the programmers who find it more efficient to develop using text-based languages. Historically, what was easier for many programmers to use was not easier for maintainers to use and because these were two different languages, programmers had to compromise. Not anymore.
  
  With FactoryTalk Design Studio, the same logic and code can be created and viewed either as text or graphical. It’s the user’s choice. Programmers can have confidence that no matter what editor they use, the code will be available in both views and will execute just the same. Programmers are empowered to make their own choice about how they want to work, knowing what they are delivering will meet the needs of their peers and other collaborators downstream.

• User-centric Collaboration: As systems grow larger and more complex and teams get more distributed, the need for better collaboration is critical. People are often forced into siloed roles to avoid stepping on each other’s toes and making overlapping edits that can result in conflicts. These limitations can help prevent programmers from working in parallel, slowing you down.
  
  The software development industry solved this problem with distributed version control systems that are designed to handle projects of all sizes reliably and efficiently. Now, FactoryTalk Design Studio leverages this proven technology to make multi-user collaboration a reality in industrial automation. With intuitive collaboration tools, automated change tracking, and conflict management capabilities, users can dramatically boost team productivity.

• Peace of Mind with Secure Storage: Every project comes with a host of data and it can be a hassle to document these files in an organized fashion as the number of projects grow and view them all in one place. Files can get lost if hard drives crash or are misplaced.
  
  Adding to that is the extra time spent upgrading project files as part of a new line development or for other reasons that can tie up computers and reduce engineering efficiency.
  
  These challenges have driven us to develop FactoryTalk® Vault™. A cloud-native secure industrial file storage, it can help to enable role-based sharing with participants and organizations to accelerate collaboration, maintain file history of any changes across a system and group project files together. It also includes a version control system to record any changes to files to keep them safe and recover files as needed. Moreover, the solution offers greater insights into design through in-depth analysis of controller project files.
  
  The adaptability of cloud-native offerings coupled with SaaS enables access from anywhere, greater ease for collaboration between team members specializing in different roles, and the ability to build, test and commission hardware virtually, achieving first-time right quality. That’s what we’re delivering with FactoryTalk Design Hub – solutions that facilitate teamwork, increase productivity, and provide new levels of flexibility. Learn more here.