Efficiency - is New Technology the Key?

As a small business we like to think that efficiency plays a huge role in our overall operation. Thinking about it,  all areas of our business are involved in activities which promote and instill greater efficiency. Yesterday,  as part of the Guardian Small Business Network, we submitted a Best Practice Exchange Entry on Efficiency, in a bid to share some of this information with other SMEs.

Looking at recent developments in technology, here are some of the current ideas which we have undertaken and are helping our customers in manufacturing, industrial and infrastructure environments use to improve their own efficiency:

1. Virtualisation – It is no secret that Virtualisation is already extremely popular in the corporate world.  By switching our servers to a virtual environment, we have started to dramatically reduced energy costs; speed up services and reduced downtime. This new, fully scalable system meets the needs of our growing business, allowing us to commission new servers in minutes, as opposed to the days/weeks associated with physical machines. All of these benefits are equally desirable within an automated plant environment. The technology is now becoming mature,  more robust and we see increased expertise across the  market on deployment of these systems. Customers seem now to have enough confidence to introduce virtualisation within their plant systems. 

2.Cloud Computing - A combination of increased flexibility and lowered cost of ownership are just some of the benefits of cloud computing for plant-level applications. Cloud computing is also helping adoption of new products and technologies in situations where customers may not have the appropriate infrastructure.


3. Fault Tolerance - In today’s increasingly competitive global manufacturing environment,

manufacturing enterprises are deploying an increasing number of mission critical applications in production operations to improve manufacturing efficiency and effectiveness. Specially designed fault-tolerant computers and subsystems, with closely coupled fully redundant components sourced from a single supplier, provide a highest availability option.