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Walk through a factory and you’ll see conveyor belts, forklifts, robotic arms—but what you won’t see is the machinery that makes it all run: communication. It’s the invisible system connecting people to machines, suppliers to plants, and customers to the final product.
Across warehouses and production lines, this hidden machinery has always been essential. Sometimes it’s a decades-old intercom still crackling overhead. Sometimes it’s a modern cloud platform connecting teams across continents. In most cases, it’s a patchwork of both.
That’s where UCaaS and CCaaS come in. Instead of ripping parts out, they link them all together into something more flexible, more responsive, and far more resilient.
Manufacturers are a different breed when it comes to communication challenges. A corporate office can shift to cloud calling in short order; a paint shop with strict no-cellphone zones cannot.
This means manufacturers are often juggling aging voice systems that aren’t going anywhere and siloed tools scattered across many different locations. To maintain the supply line and keep operations up, locations out in the wilderness need to keep up with plants and offices in city centers.
In certain circumstances, including regulations and environmental factors, mobile devices are impractical at best and prohibited at worst. Organizations like this benefit from combining UCaaS and CCaaS with their existing systems, creating a hybrid environment.
A UCaaS platform like Cisco Webex or Microsoft Teams adds a single control panel for all your communication tools; literally or figuratively, depending on your setup. Voice, video, and messaging all lives on one platform that can be accessed from a mobile or on-premise device. 
Engineers on the floor can instantly loop in remote specialists instantly. Design and production teams can collaborate in real time even across different time zones. All the while, managers and team leaders can control the whole environment from one dashboard.
These platforms can also make use of features like asynchronous video to improve communications across time zones. While morning meetings happen at a US-based headquarters, employees in East Asia can catch up on important information and still get to bed at a reasonable hour.
CCaaS takes the UCaaS benefits and expands them to include the outside world. In manufacturing, the outside world goes further than customers. It includes suppliers, distributors, and service partners.
Stakes are high when global organizations maintain supply lines and operations with many other parties. An omnichannel CCaaS platform, like the Continuant Connect Contact Center (C4), centralizes every interaction, even across different countries and systems.
Intelligent routing ensures each partner speaks with the right agent, leader, or representative.
AI integration automates menial tasks, freeing up agents for important conversations and game-changing dilemmas. Real-time translations transcend language barriers, making seamless international service more of a reality than ever.
As important as the big picture is, manufacturing is an industry built on the daily grind. Beyond utopic visions of a unified global network, how does UCaaS and CCaaS help the people who make it all work?
Here are a few UCaaS and CCaaS use cases to demonstrate.
Even small issues in a single factory can shut down colossal manufacturing conglomerates. Say a factory in Tennessee experiences a sudden line stoppage. Before, they’d have to wait for an overseas technician to fly in to fix it, much to the chagrin of customers, partners, and worst of all, the people who sign their paychecks.
Now, one Teams call to the German office is enough to fix it. Instead of days, everything was fixed in a matter of hours.
Turning manufacturing into one of those frustrating school group projects sounds like a recipe for disaster, especially if two plants working on said project are on opposite sides of the US.
With upgraded communications, however, these two plants are able to operate like one big team. Clear instructions find their way to everyone involved, and update come through in real time as the project progresses.
There are organizations that simply can’t afford to go 100% cloud based. Hybrid UCaaS and CCaaS solutions turn this from a detriment into a benefit, alleviating expenses and even ensuring business continuity.
Let’s say a facility several miles from the nearest city loses its internet connection in harsh weather. Since it still has its analog tools, its workers weather the storm while keeping up contact with the outside world.
The reverse is also true. If the same facility suffers a network outage, it can rely on its modern setup instead.
At Continuant, we’ve worked with businesses of all sizes managing their communications systems. We provide our customers with tailored solutions that meet their needs without breaking the bank.
Adient, a global automobile seat manufacturer, is just one example. Where before they had relied on an Avaya system, we helped Adient deploy a Microsoft Teams UC solution with hardware provided as a service. To add to the deal, we also provided an omnichannel cloud-based contact center.
If this is what we could do for 20,000 users at an international industry leader, imagine what we could do for your organization. When the hidden machinery of communication is running smoothly, everything else will as well.
Call us today to get started.