| | MAY 20178CIOReviewBeing at the Epicentre of the AR MovementBy Joanne Moretti, SVP & CMO, JabilAs an enabler of accelerated innovation and global manufacturing, it's especially exciting when you can influence both the development and the use of new technologies. Especially exciting is the activity we are seeing in the Augmented Reality (AR) space.On the one hand, we get to help customers enable new AR based products through our optics engineering and active alignment capabilities, through our acoustics capabilities (yes, we believe AR needs "sound" if it is going to really augment reality), through our precision mechanics and legacy: electronics engineering capabilities. In fact, we are involved with customers by perfecting these elements of their AR based product strategies from idea to prototype and prototype to production. We are right at the epicentre of this technology development, and it's incredible to see the technology evolve right before our eyes.On the other hand, we also get to explore how to use this new technology in our own internal processes from design, through manufacturing and operations to supply chain. For example, one project in the works is with our friends at Microsoft. We are working on leveraging their Hololens technology, their Azure platform and HP's 3D Printing technology to create a "Digital Thread" between ideation, design, prototyping and then right into production. It's still early days, but our partnerships with these firms and the digital thread we are creating (including the application of AI & Machine Learning with support from IBM Watson and Microsoft Cortana), will ultimately help us accelerate our design, prototyping and manufacturing processes even more so, giving us speed and agility, and helping us to deliver even greater value to our customers.Once we reach the downstream manufacturing processes, there are even more opportunities to use AR as we consider areas like supply chain simulation, preventative maintenance within our manufacturing facilities and much more. The ability to model, simulate and tweak products, processes and supply chains visually and intuitively creates huge opportunity and potential value. Manufacturing agility is a core competence at Jabil and AR, alongside AI will have a huge role to play in the development of an Internet of Manufacturing (IoM) or smart factory solution.While AR offers us the opportunity to deliver all of our solutions faster and more effectively, it is also an area in which we provide a great deal of experience and expertise.It's very fulfilling to be so engaged in the AR movement, and it's especially gratifying to see our Global CIO, Gary Cantrell, heavily involved. Gary and his team enable us to quickly study and take advantage of the latest technologies. And given our CEO, Mark Mondello, has publicly gone on record stating that he wants "Jabil to become the most technologically advanced manufacturing solutions provider on the planet," our company is completely aligned and committed to leveraging technology in order to: a) help our customers innovate new products; b) help ourselves become more agile and fast, which also delivers great value to our customers in the end; and c) create new business models at Jabil that will deliver accretive revenue and drive shareholder value.Cantrell is fully supportive and extremely engaged when it comes to testing our initiatives both from a compute power as well as big data perspective. He leverages a host of partnerships, crossing both on-prem and cloud based solutions. We can quickly Joanne MorettiIN MY Opinion
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