Manufacturing one sector moving some software systems to the cloud

Manufacturing, engineering and operations groups are moving to the cloud in greater numbers with a dramatic increase expected by 2017, according to a new survey from retail tech company ICIX.

One standout finding of the survey is that as these companies move operations, engineering and manufacturing to the cloud, platforms like Salesforce – which were originally developed for sales and marketing – could become the backbone of all enterprise software.

“Manufacturing and operations professionals have clearly realized that building on one common cloud platform throughout an enterprise has enormous benefits, including improved productivity, better automation of information sharing for improved decision-making and greater transparency,” said Brian Roufa, chief marketing officer for ICIX. “With this significant shift in the industry, companies are now moving more and more of their core business functions to the cloud – and are choosing strategic cloud platforms such as Salesforce on which to run their business.”

Other findings of the survey include the following:
• More than 60% of respondents said cloud apps have helped them realize internally focused benefits. Higher employee productivity, process automation, data visibility and lower IT costs ranked as the top cloud benefits.

• 80% of operations departments, 70% of engineering groups and 59% of manufacturing departments expect to grow their use of enterprise cloud apps dramatically by 2017.

• Only 19% of manufacturing, 20% of operations and 25% of engineering departments are using enterprise cloud apps.