The asterisk has long been used to highlight exceptions or to call attention to a footnote or annotation. For example, a home run record that was influenced by an extended baseball season was noted with an asterisk. This mark is also used to call out legal terms or extended information on a topic.

I think we should be using an asterisk in our conversations about Industry 4.0. This blog explains why I chose an asterisk instead of some other mark in my description of Industry 4.0*.

2020 has been an incredible year for Microsoft and especially for Microsoft Teams. With many organizations quickly adopting new ways for employees to work from anywhere, Microsoft Teams has seen a meteoric rise in usage for meetings and collaboration. In fact, Microsoft recently announced that by the end of April 2020, usage of Microsoft Teams had surpassed 75 million active users, a massive increase from the 44 million users reported the previous month.

One of the greatest assets of Microsoft Teams is that the platform is growing and adding new capabilities on a seemingly weekly basis. As organizations look for new ways to use the platform and further integrate Teams into their business processes, they will soon discover solutions for customized workflows, business process automation, direct integrations with Microsoft and third-party applications that provide a single pane of glass experience, and even industry vertical-specific functionality for supported tenants.

To help organizations discover some of these capabilities, I compiled a list of four unique use cases that organizations might consider for the next stage in their Microsoft Teams journey.

Manufacturers can use the Internet of Things as the foundation for digital transformation efforts that maximize efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction. But as they explore these efforts, many manufacturers run into two common hurdles: applying IoT to legacy manufacturing equipment and making sense of all the data flooding in. The good news is both hurdles…

Unplanned downtime is a crisis for manufacturers. It’s bad enough that productivity comes to a screeching halt, but when a company can’t meet its commitments to customers due to downtime, it erodes the trust those customer have in that company. IIoT World reports that 82 percent of companies have experienced unplanned downtime in the past…

Once upon a time — and not all that long ago — the data center was the only place for IT workloads to run. If an organization needed to process large amounts of data, that’s where it happened. But the emergence of the cloud, coupled with the rise of digital transformation and the Internet of…

Manufacturers favor “just in time” over “just in case” across the entire supply chain because it minimizes overhead expenses and fattens margins. But manufacturers, their suppliers and their customers are still leaving a lot of money on the table because they don’t have deep, real-time visibility into all of the factors that affect supply, demand…