What CrowdStrike Tells us About Software

Don’t be afraid to take a step forward. I was just on a call earlier today with a group of leaders that will be participating in a panel discussion at an Industry 4.0 conference later next month and the word around the table was “don’t be afraid.” According to one, no blood will be shed by choosing to move to technology to help you on your shop floor.

She’s right, although some of you may be rethinking the use of technology based on what happened with CrowdStrike and Microsoft last week. People who are traveling are still feeling the effects of that. I’m going to ask you to think back to the days of travel agents and 1-800 numbers; back when those were the only way to get airline travel.

You would call the number (agent or airline) and sit on hold for a while. We had a travel agent that worked for the business who would fax us (yep) a pricing chart for options leaving earlier and later in the day / week so we could flex the trips to meet the budget, rather than the reverse. Living in Cincinnati, that’s a must. For a long while, we were a Delta hub and they owned everything flying out of the “friendly skies” of Northern Kentucky.

My point is that those days were painful. You were beholden to the person on the phone and their capabilities to get the job done. The systems they used were slow, too, so the answers weren’t coming fast and, often, the options could be gone by the time you decided. Today, you get to navigate all that yourself - not just with an airline, but you can use a service like Skyscanner to amalgamate all the options and whittle them down to what works for you. You get all the flexibility you need with the tools you choose.

So, what did you lose with the upgrade to self-guided travel? In the world of “nothing is free,” what did you pay for this service? Well, if you’ve ever searched for a flight where you weren’t decisive or didn’t like the first option you saw, you will have seen those prices climb. They watch the searches you’re making, and flight prices increase as you continue to search. How willing are you to deal with the way these flight prices increase in exchange for not spending 2 hours on the phone?

Production Operations

In the world of manufacturing, the technology you use will help you move forward. It always does. It’s more reliable and more cost-effective than a human. No matter what the job, the computer will always do it faster. That doesn’t mean it should. But it can. Think about the visibility that you have into your production operations. When you send an order (job) to the shop floor, how much information can you get on it right now? If your customer called right now and wanted or needed to know when you would be done with the work you promised them, would you be able to answer them?

That’s something a digital platform can do for you (if you choose the right one). It should be able to be your “eyes and ears” on the production shop floor and help you navigate all those questions that you never used to be able to answer. It will also give you the ability to troubleshoot issues and move work around as things go faster or slower, better or worse, than you predicted.

Paperless Operations

We don’t see many users eliminate the use of all paper on their shop floor. That’s a bit drastic for the manufacturers that we work with – all operator-centric, discrete, or variable manufacturers. Paperless manufacturing, for us at least, is about eliminating paper and people processes where they don’t make sense. It’s about using technology to help you do your work better, with higher quality and less time. It’s about tracking the work your team does and keeping it for trendlines, performance metrics and audits.

Will there be bumps in the road? Sure. Will every piece of the software you choose do exactly what you want the way you want it to? Not likely. There are ways to make smart choices about the tools you use. Don’t let recent events make the choice for you. Look for access points that make sense for you – maybe an on-premises application that you don’t need cloud access to use? Or one where you don’t have to look for an application that can tell you about the cloud service they use? We’ve selected the Oracle Cloud for Quantum, as it’s well-known for its security clearances. We wanted the zero-trust architecture to support our customers who selected the cloud option, and we offer the on-premises version for those who don’t.