Editor’s comment: March 2018

The MTA annual dinner, held at the Park Plaza, Westminster Bridge a couple of weeks ago was as usual, a great networking event.

I haven’t attended the dinner for a couple of years due to personal circumstances so this was my first time at the Park Plaza. Impressive venue. Stayed locally too – in quite possibly the smallest room I’ve ever seen at the Point A, Westminster. Nice bed, but I think they built the hotel around it. The only place I’ve ever stayed where the lift was bigger than the room, but nevertheless an engineering masterpiece. Never before have I seen so much crammed into so little space.

I digress. At the event I was introduced to Rowan Williams, Microsoft’s marketing manager. I did wonder – for a fleeting nanosecond – why he was attending a manufacturing dinner, but it really isn’t rocket science when you think about it.

We all know Microsoft only too well but historically, they’ve not been a company that crops up too often in manufacturing circles. Personally, like many others I suspect, the only contact I’ve had with them is that I type all my articles in Word, build spreadsheets in Excel and deliver the odd presentation in PowerPoint. Oh, there’s Windows of course.

But times they are a-changing. Now, in an Industry 4.0 driven universe, the worlds of IT and manufacturing are growing ever closer and the boundaries are blurring. When I interviewed Mazak’s Mark Hall for our January cover story, he said the same thing. He predicted data scientists would be a sought-after profession in the future when manufacturing would be underpinned by data. That’s already starting to happen.

And that’s why Rowan was at the MTA dinner because he’s part of the team pioneering manufacturing at Microsoft. He was delighted to be at the event and after chatting with him for 20 minutes or so it became crystal clear that he was genuinely excited about opportunities that lay ahead for the mutual benefit of both sectors.

Actually, the software behemoth is, of course, no stranger to industry 4.0 – or the Internet of Things as Microsoft tends to call it. On this website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/internet-of-things/manufacturing there’s a ton of case studies, including one from Sandvik who used Microsoft’s Azure IoT suite and Dynamics 365 to implement an advanced predictive maintenance schedule.

Now manufacturing companies and software developers that previously lived separate lives, suddenly find themselves thrown together in a new data driven digital world.

Dave Tudor Editorial Director