While manufacturing enterprises have realized substantial gains in business productivity with their software investments over the last several decades, research suggests a great deal of room for improvement in ease of use, user adoption, and business efficiency across the organization and its business network.
The business and technology environment continues to change at an accelerating pace, with growing competitive intensity in every industry accompanied by a shift in power to customers and consumers. Users are faced with increasing complexity, requiring access to real-time, accurate, cross-functional information. Most business applications have evolved to serve specific business functions—for example, product-lifecycle management (PLM) for design and engineering, customer relationship management (CRM) for sales and service, or enterprise resource planning (ERP) for finance and human-resources management. This has resulted in a legacy of silos between the organization’s business functions and processes, making it extremely difficult for business users to drive collaborative decision-making spanning across business functions and organizational networks.
To make effective real-time decisions, technology needs to not only support the structured business process workflows but the unstructured ways in which decisions are made and communicated. It must also support ease of use and broad access to contextually relevant enterprise information for all users. And to improve agility and market responsiveness, technology needs to facilitate collaboration, business insight, and secure information sharing across the organization’s extended network of customers, partners, and suppliers.
Customers of Microsoft® and its partners are increasingly looking for guidance that bridges the gap between key business imperatives and the technical components that enable the delivery of high-value, high-impact, rapidly deployable business solutions. Microsoft’s Discrete Manufacturing Reference Architecture framework (DIRA) identifies six themes that enhance innovation and productivity to help discrete manufacturers select technologies to improve individual performance, extract more value from existing enterprise software investments, enhance cross-functional and cross-organizational collaboration, and create new customer-focused products and services to seize opportunities in a fast-changing, ever-more-interconnected world.