Manufacturing: Challenges and Solutions

In an industry where complexity and competition is increasing, product quality is critical to business success. At the same time, cost avoidance and reduction are essential to the bottom line, getting products to market rapidly is the lifeblood of your company. From automotive to aerospace, IT managers are forced to balance the need for superior designs, improved product quality and shorter time to market with lowered IT utilization.

Manufacturing firms are the most affected by the supply of competent low cost labor to build valuable contribution margin. Often the cost of network infrastructure is at odds with this primary directive.

Many manufacturing firms are looking to outsource labor to developing nations as way to bridge the gap. While this reduces the cost of labor, it does little to address the security and infrastructure required to drive the value chain.

In an effort to gain competitive advantage, manufacturing firms are looking for new ways to streamline the manufacturing process, differentiate product offerings, and streamline value chains using networking technology and by adopting new communications applications. Effective management of DNS, DHCP and IP inventories is a highly effective way for manufacturing organizations to reduce operational costs associated with inefficient and costly network management.

Manufacturing firms are focused on driving service through technology by reducing the cost of product production, improving communication applications and improving supply management. Performing theses tasks requires a mixture of implied process, application deployment and resilient network infrastructure.

The key technology initiatives for manufacturing organizations include improving networks security, wireless infrastructure (network access and asset tracking), web services and enterprise application integration. When manufacturing companies live and die by their supply chain there is no room for network outages. The traditional approach of using outdated and vulnerable servers running BIND and DHCP doesn’t cut it anymore. BlueCat Networks solutions increase network scalability, reliability and resiliency.

The manufacturing industry will spend over $466 billion a year on IT spending worldwide by 2009 (Gartner Dataquest — September 2005). The most-successful manufacturing firms are focused on reducing operational costs, decreasing manufacturing and distribution costs and actively measuring performance. Putting an effective network strategy in place helps manufacturing organizations to continue to drive costs down, increase profitability over the longer term.

Industry Challenges

• Manufacturing operations are moving offshore and as a result are driving IT expenditures to ensure adequate communications between joint ventures and regional offices.
• Audit and reporting is becoming a main focus as manufacturing organizations must also comply with external regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley, this has a direct impact on infrastructure costs.
• Manufacturers are adopting new network technologies that provide improved command and control for corporate performance management.
• Organizations are looking for ways to integrate services for traditional business-projects (E. G. for mergers and acquisitions).
• Merger of regional and business unit integration under one management umbrella.
• Expanded interest in wireless and VoIP and unified communications.
• Provide seamless access to product portfolios for alternative distribution channels.
• Deploy secure networking technology to ensure privacy protection, compliance with corporate and government governance standards.

The BlueCat Advantage

Move your IP network to a highly-scalable, reliable and resilient network architecture with BlueCat Networks award winning line of Adonis DNS/DHCP and Proteus IPAM appliances. BlueCat’s purpose-built appliance solutions are perfectly suited to help manufacturing firms to improve connectivity, tighten management controls while dramatically reducing total cost of ownership.

BlueCat’s IP infrastructure appliances are a logical extension of your network. BlueCat Networks solutions are designed to help financial services organizations improve customer responsiveness, decreases costs and improve competitive advantage. In fact, BlueCat Solutions typically offer a payback period of less than 3 ½ months with a return on investment of over 380%.

Increase Revenue

Built with security in mind, all Adonis and Proteus appliances are based on firewall-grade operating systems, have built in high availability and protection against pharming, DoS and other zero-day exploits. This means your company’s network risk is substantially lowered and your organization can focus on driving new ways to deliver products to market and better service customers, not manage the network.

Decrease Costs

All BlueCat Networks solutions are designed to reduce the time required to manage complex network topologies. Whether your network is IPv4 or IPv6, wired or wireless, BlueCat solutions provide intuitive command and control for your IP networks. With smart features like configuration and deployment wizards, built in error checking and one-to-many deployment, BlueCat appliances will dramatically lower your total cost of ownership. In the first year of ownership, the Adonis™’s total cost is less than half of the total cost of competing solutions.

IT and Business Integration

Both the Proteus Enterprise IPAM Appliance and family of Adonis DNS/DHCP appliances are designed to help organizations simplify the task of managing disparate technologies. Adonis enables organizations to easily migrate DNS and DHCP configurations from legacy platforms to a more cost effective, secure and scalable appliance based solution. Proteus greatly simplifies the management of large, geographically distributed networks. Proteus is designed to simplify policy compliance and has built-in monitoring tool to ensure compliance. Using a unique multi-core architecture, Proteus enables organizations to rapidly remodel and repatriate network resources, a challenge that plagues organizations who are in the midst of merger/acquisition transactions. BlueCat Networks solutions greatly simplify IP inventory management, and enable unified management of distributed IT networks.

Gain Competitive Advantage

With BlueCat Adonis and Proteus solutions, your organization can easily scale to manage millions of IP addresses with hundreds of concurrent administrators. This means that regardless of your organizations size, BlueCat has a solution that will help you speed time to market and guarantee the availability of your mission critical applications. Spend less time tracking the allocation of scarce IP addresses, managing DNS and DHCP; spend more time servicing your customers.

ITSynergy

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Ricoh Company Ltd.

Xerocomm

SSCI Systems GmbH

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