Q&A: Modern Manufacturing Calls for Modern UCaaS

In a new series of Q&As and interviews, we’re focusing on vertical-first approaches to various technologies, enabling MSPs and resellers to deliver impactful, business-ready solutions to their clients. In this edition, we focus on the digital transformation underway in manufacturing and what your clients might need from you as a provider.

Paul Holden is the VP of EMEA sales at CallTower. This Q&A has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Why technology and automation have not solved everything (yet)

Manufacturing is experiencing a rapid digital transformation. What’s responsible for this change?

Industry 4.0 is behind this change, and with it comes an eruption of monitoring, data, and new forms of intelligence. They’re promising businesses more control over production, with smart factories and tightly integrated supply chains throwing up great opportunities. We’re talking about everything from detailed real-time supply monitoring to cars that take part in their own assembly. The benefits are substantial, too. AI-driven features such as predictive maintenance and automated quality control reduce costs, optimize production, and help manage risk. Digital twins, for example, let firms model changes or entire new factories to assess performance before committing investment. And the numbers speak for themselves. A 2023 survey by the Manufacturing Leadership Council found that 96% of companies already planned to invest more in AI by 2030.

With all of this automation, you’d think communications would be easier. But at Cleafy, you’ve identified a “floor-to-office gap” – what is it, and why’s it a challenge?

Despite technological advancements, manufacturing still relies on the skills, intuition, and expertise of its workforce. The problem is that where this workforce is split between the office and the factory floor, communications gaps can develop, and even the best-designed systems can come under stress. For example, when workers aren’t looped into office decisions, news spreads through the grapevine and can quickly ferment into a problem. Meanwhile, managers who act without insight into the factory floor risk fundamental missteps that erode everything from productivity to safety.

This isn’t a new challenge per se, though modern communication systems can actually make things worse when they’re not done right. Floor workers typically depend on hard phone systems throughout their working day, while they’re separated from their Teams-using colleagues in the office. Chatter from the factory floor doesn’t easily percolate upwards outside of formal meetings, so ideas get lost and essential feedback gets delayed. Meanwhile, office workers who are comfortable brainstorming via productivity suites and keeping in touch via smartphones and laptops may not realize they’re excluding colleagues with limited opportunities to stay informed. Directions, decisions, and policies shared in the cloud can fail to land on the floor, creating management and leadership vacuums.

Why is it so critical to solve this problem now, given the context of smart factories and AI integration?

Because communications gaps directly undermine your return on AI and automation investments. When you have isolated workforces and internal barriers, you’re essentially blocking the analysis and insights that these expensive smart systems generate from reaching the people who need to act on them. Consider a practical example. When AI-powered predictive maintenance alerts are generated, you want managers and specialists to have oversight of those predictions and recommendations, but also provide feedback to improve the system’s accuracy. If floor workers can’t easily communicate what they’re seeing with the equipment, or if office-based managers can’t quickly relay decisions back to the floor, then you’re working with only partial information and oversight. In today’s integrated supply chains, where factories are connected upstream and downstream, this communication breakdown becomes a serious competitive disadvantage.

Leveraging UCaaS solutions to bridge the gap in an AI-driven world

There’s a lot at risk, so how can companies bridge the communications gap?

Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is essential for bridging the gap. UCaaS tightly integrates comms solutions into a single, cloud-based delivery model, allowing closer, seamless management and communication throughout the organization. UCaaS takes devices like the Cisco Webex hard phones used on the factory floor and combines them with Microsoft Teams used in the office. Instead of having two separate systems that don’t talk to each other, you have one integrated solution where a factory worker can seamlessly communicate with office staff and vice versa. This removes the barriers within manufacturing organizations, leading to the freer exchange of vital information, valuable ideas, and insight that help to improve operations across the board.

How then does this integrated approach specifically benefit AI and automation initiatives? 

Integrating your communications enables better human-AI collaboration because workers can easily provide input and feedback to improve AI systems. When your predictive maintenance system suggests an action, for example, all workers can quickly communicate whether that recommendation makes sense based on what they’re seeing. Ultimately, these forms of feedback make your AI systems more accurate and effective over time, increasing your ROI. On top of this, AI-driven systems can actually enhance communication itself. These systems can intelligently route information based on rules and adaptive learning. For example, automatically channeling urgent maintenance alerts to the right specialists. An integrated communications platform makes it much easier to connect your computer systems directly to the right people, creating automated pathways for data and insights to flow through your business exactly when and where they’re needed.

Looking ahead, what’s your view on the role of human workers in increasingly automated manufacturing, then?

Well, here’s the paradox: as data, automation, and AI-powered insights are needed for competitive advantage, the human factor actually grows in importance. As physical supply chains, factories, and their products become more capable of participating in the manufacturing process, human insight and intuition become increasingly focused, critical, and valuable. Human workers need to be able to supervise AI decisions, for example, and apply their experience to interpret what any systems or data is telling them. Again, this is why overcoming communication barriers is so important. If they persist, then you’re preventing this crucial human intelligence from being applied where it’s needed most.

UCaaS platforms are key to lowering communication barriers within manufacturing businesses and supporting the easy and timely exchange of information – a fundamental prerequisite of coordinated and informed decision-making. Unified comms help provide the platform for tighter integration between teams as manufacturing businesses embrace automation and AI. As such, they’re a strategic imperative for manufacturers looking for a competitive edge in this rapidly changing sector.