Everything is coming together in the Industrial Automation space.

Photo by Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs

Let me paint you a picture.

For most of the 20th century and into the 21st century manufacturing and finance felt heavy. Things were analog, greasy, clunky, slow, manually driven, and a remnant of the industrial and early tech age in offices with cubicles, copiers, and fax machines.

In the factory nothing was connected, and everything was managed using clip boards and moving parts on a wall board.

In the Finance department everything was run off paper, printers, and spreadsheets.

That has all changed.

Digital Transformation & Finance Transformation.

Things are connected today at a level never before seen in manufacturing, and we’re still only in the early days of this transformation.

It starts in the Engineering department with Design and runs all the way through Production, Operations, Supply Chain, and into the Finance department with Order to Revenue (O2R).

This is a story about how we go from engineering to manufacturing to invoicing in one fell swoop.

There are reasons this happened and in many ways they have as much to do with demographics as much as actual technology advancements.