Microsoft's Smart Manufacturing Innovation & PTC Partnership

Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. Amol Adgaonkar is a Sr. Director within the Worldwide Manufacturing & Mobility Industry team at Microsoft. As a Solutions lead for the team, he drives Microsoft’s strategy & solutions for the Factory and Supply chain, develops Microsoft’s global industry partner ecosystem, as well as engages with customers worldwide on their strategic initiatives. He also drives strategic go-to-market initiatives to transform manufacturing focused enterprises at scale and accelerate their AI led digital transformation.

Here, Adgaonkar tells us about smart manufacturing innovation, building resilient supply chains and AI.

Smart manufacturing and transformative technologies with Microsoft and PTC

From a manufacturing perspective, Microsoft has four key priorities:

Unlock innovation and introduce new products

Unlocking innovation focuses on how manufacturers engineer, design and develop simulations. 

Enable Intelligent Factories

Intelligent Factories is the big opportunity around smart manufacturing, where Microsoft looks at transformations on the factory floor, in which that smart product is being manufactured. 

Resilient manufacturing supply chain

When it comes to resilient supply chains, Microsoft looks at the direct materials, indirect materials and everything that feeds these factories. 

Modernise the customer experience

For the fourth area, Microsoft’s goal is to transform its customer experience, in terms of product use, maintenance field service and the types of scenarios including CPQ, smart contracting and everything else that goes around in the sales side of things. 

“We primarily think in terms of transformation,” explains Adgaonkar. “It is through these four priorities that we think in terms of transforming factories for smart manufacturing and bring our technologies to a customer. Microsoft likes to infuse its technology to empower people across these areas at the same time, accelerating innovation that happens across all of them and infusing AI that goes across all of them and so on.”

AI is the ‘new thing’ that people are talking about, but it's been there for a long time and Microsoft has been using neural networks in its products & services for a very long time.

“Now it's all about large language models, GPT and how manufacturers can use it to transform operations. That's how we would like to think of smart manufacturing.”

Boston-based software development company PTC is one of Microsoft’s most trusted top tier partners, especially for manufacturing. PTC’s solutions go end to end and it has everything from CAD and product design to PLM, to manufacturing to service. 

“If you look at a product lifecycle or a manufacturer's view of the entire lifecycle of their operations, PTC covers it all and covers it really well,” said Adgaonkar. “They're on almost every factory floor helping customers transform bits from product design to manufacturing. PTC is uniquely positioned in terms of bringing capabilities like a digital thread to life.”

Over the next year, Microsoft will continue working with PTC in many ways, especially in terms of analytics and AI.

“What PTC helps us do is identify opportunities to improve production efficiency very quickly and bring in additional technologies.” 

With the right data platform in the back, Microsoft can help leverage AI do further improve production and do things like root cause analysis.

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