As many companies and professionals continue advocating for cloud migration, there is no longer doubt that the cloud offers businesses what they need. However, many manufacturing firms have yet to understand the cloud’s crucial part in product design. This can be blamed on the unavailability of adequate engineering packages, product life cycle management applications, (PLM) and computer-aided design (CAD) packages on the cloud. Due to this dearth of tools, migrating operations from on-premise to the cloud is still elusive to many businesses.  

Despite the challenges that can arise from migration, cloud service, and software provision is improving.  An example of companies that offer cloud service for product design is TECHNIA.Cloud providers. The company is known for providing configurable solutions to businesses.  These configurable solutions offer various benefits in product design and management which include reduction of complexities and overhead associated with an on-site approach.

With an on-site approach, tools needed for design such as PLM and CAD as well as the high cost of IT infrastructure and personnel required may be too expensive for many businesses. However, by taking advantage of cloud through software-as-a-service, service providers can take charge of the management of infrastructure. A service provider will ensure that software and hardware are updated and their experts are highly trained. Another critical characteristic of cloud industrial product design is that cloud based design software and data can be accessed by employees from anywhere.

Using a cloud-based platform in product design and manufacturing facilitates research, design and product development is crucial in innovation. It reduces costs or developing a product and at the same time increases the speed of marketing since speed and performance are often synonymous. The support and reliability of cloud networks are often based on SLAs and therefore cloud providers strive to meet terms of their SLA. Terms stipulated in the SLA must be delivered by a service provider as this offers them a competitive edge and customers may defect to other providers if these terms are not fulfilled.

Scaling is a crucial aspect of investment in software and hardware solutions in any organization. In an environment where businesses need to maximize profits, a company will always look for ways to eliminate costs that are not enhancing income. For this reason, many people are now shifting to cloud systems that can be easily scaled up or down as per the shifting workloads and demands. Similarly, manufacturing firms are now seeing the importance of cloud-based product design which allows a company to leverage on scalable computational resources on an on-demand basis.

With clouds pay-as-you-go approach, a manufacturer can access computational resources it needs to design their products without having to purchase sophisticated hardware and software for design up-front. For this reason, many companies now prefer cloud against on-site as it addresses most of their concerns.