Making the value of technology clear
Requirements for New Engineers
Industry needs more engineering graduates. New engineers must be comfortable with cross discipline projects, a range of technology including digitalization, and horizontal organizations. Along with this deep skillset, industry wants engineers to be strong problem solvers with the aptitude to apply technology to solve problems. Previous Tech-Clarity research finds that industry believes schools could do better to meet these requirements.
Requirements for Learning Approaches
Much of this is due to the traditional lecture-based approach to education. By reshaping the curriculum to focus on project-based learning and partnering with industry thought leaders, there is tremendous opportunity to improve students’ education.
Schools should:
Next Steps
Based on this research and our experience, Tech-Clarity offers the following recommendations:
What should supply chain-centric innovators consider when looking for PLM? How has the PLM landscape changed over the last several years, and how does SaaS fit into that picture?
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor, Upchain (registration required).
"Cloud PLM" is not a Cookie Cutter Decision
Choose the Right SaaS PLM Solution
Where should mold makers focus to boost business profitability?
With significant business pressures and the technical complexity of injection molding, mold making is a challenging business. While tool makers face many obstacles, those surveyed identified five top challenges that make it harder to maintain a successful business. This blog post reveals these top five challenges, and the strategies to deal with them.
Read the full guest post on the Siemens NX Design Blog.
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How can manufacturers most effectively design, develop, and launch custom-engineered products that must be engineered to customer specifications? Tech-Clarity's eBook, Bringing Custom-Engineered Products to Market, shares survey data from over 200 companies to offer insights and best practices.
Please enjoy the summary* below. Click here for the full report, thank you to our sponsor Propel (registration required).
Custom-Engineering Increases the Top Line
Product customization has increased in recent years and is expected to continue to grow "significantly" for most companies over the next several years. What's driving this expansion? The benefits reported by our survey respondents help explain why.
Customization Improves the Bottom Line
Driving higher sales is no guarantee of greater profitability. If custom-engineering results in selling products too cheaply or allowing costs to get out of control, the company can still lose money. Fortunately, 44% of respondents also share the custom-engineered products help them achieve higher sales margins. Whatever the cause, higher margins help ensure that the top-line benefits of custom-engineered products fall to the bottom line.
Speed without control, however, can be counterproductive. It could lead to errors or delays if companies don’t design quality into their designs upfront. These problems can have a significant impact considering that respondents say most of their engineering customization happens during customer inquiry / investigation phase and/or during quote / proposal stage – when time is at a premium.
The challenges highlighted create serious consequences. Survey respondents indicate that these challenges lead to low margins, inefficiency, unhappy customers, rework/scrap, lost orders, missed market opportunities, and more. These are the negative business consequences of speed without control.
Are your production approaches as smart as they are sophisticated? Before you answer, consider whether all the information about each aspect of the fab is readily available. Imagine the benefits in flexibility, quality, costs, agility, speed, confidence... this is the vision of smart manufacturing. To capture today’s myriad opportunities, these improvements are essential. The good news is, it’s possible today. Please visit our sponsor Siemens for the full webcast (registration required).
What is needed for manufacturers to improve the maturity of BOM-related processes to help to manage complexity, improve efficiency, prevent mistakes, and enhance collaboration across departments and the supply chain? Read our buyer's guide to find out.
Please enjoy the summary below. Click here for the full report, thank you to our sponsor PTC.
Diagnosing BOM Management Issues
It’s important to recognize that these requirements are in addition to the basic needs of managing product data, as most companies will extend their PDM or PLM environment to manage BOMs. These solutions provide platform capabilities such as access control and IP protection that serve as a critical foundation for effective BOM management.
What do manufacturers need to know when they select a cloud Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution?
Although manufacturers have started to adopt cloud solutions for many aspects of their business, PLM has lagged behind. Our research shows that over one-half of manufacturers are considering cloud and about one-quarter already leverage the cloud support product innovation and manufacturing. Given the increased interest and adoption, we developed selection criteria to help companies navigate the options and choose the best-suited PLM cloud option for their business.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor PTC (registration required).
A Solution First Approach
Cloud solutions are becoming more popular, yet PLM adoption in the cloud has been slower than other applications. The transition, however, is picking up pace. In fact, more companies are now asking, "why not the cloud?" instead of "why consider cloud?". We commend that companies pick their solution first and then choose their deployment option. This is effectively a "solution first" approach as opposed to a "cloud first" approach. We find that companies are just not willing to shortchange functionality in this crucial area. They recognize it's important to evaluate the functional capabilities of a PLM system to ensure they'll gain the significant top- and bottom-line benefits that PLM delivers.
PLM Benefits and Business Value
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) spans multiple levels, offering value in multiple ways. PLM basics help manage products, parts, collaboration and release processes which leads to important benefits including increased productivity, preventing errors, reduced cost, improved quality, enhanced reliability, and more.
Enterprise PLM expands that value by further helping companies develop, manufacture, and support their products. Our PLM Beyond Managing CAD study finds that expanded PLM use improves business performance, and that higher performing companies have more departments and third parties using PLM.
Get the Right PLM to Provide the Value
PLM drives tangible business value. This value is evolving and expanding quickly as companies pursue digital enterprise initiatives and expand the benefits to new business models capabilities. This value is available, but requires the right PLM system.
Recommendations for Cloud PLM Selection
To help companies research and analyze potential solutions based on company needs, including needs that help deliver benefits well into the future, Tech-Clarity offers the following recommendations:
Is structural analysis enough or should design engineers use CFD too?
This guest post on the Siemens Solid Edge Blog explores this question. With product complexity increasing, it is harder than ever for engineers to make the right decision decisions. Complexity comes from the ever increasing amount of components, configurations, and electronics. Consequently, greater complexity has also increased the importance of understanding additional physics. For example, it's critical to understand the interactions of airflow around electronics so that they do not overheat. This is where Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) fits in.
CFD helps analyze airflow, among other fluids, and can help you uncover common problems that lead to failure, beyond what only structural analysis does. With this in mind, how else can it help design decisions?
This guest post discusses the many ways Computational Fluid Dynamics can help engineers design better products.
To learn more, view the related webinar.
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What step are many companies missing to ensure their Industry 4.0 initiatives succeed? Why Strategy Matters to Industry 4.0 Success discusses the importance of enterprise strategy. The right strategy makes even pilot projects more likely to live up to their potential. This eBook talks about how thinking big for enterprise transformation makes initiatives more pragmatic.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor, Critical Manufacturing (registration required).
Strategy matters to Industry 4.0 success in several ways. Projects that have a clear context in strategy can deliver benefits not only locally, but roll out more widely and deliver enterprise benefits. Continuous Improvement (CI) progress can be smoother and more assured. With that clear strategic foundation, Industry 4.0 enables manufacturers to deliver higher value to their customers and markets now and into the future.
In short, Strategy Matters to Industry 4.0!
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. A link to download the full report is available here.
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the report, please contact us.
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How can you choose the right PDM system for your business to make sure you achieve your productivity, product success, and profitability goals? The product data management (PDM) Buyer’s Guide is a reference tool to provide direction on what to look for when selecting a PDM system for your company. This guide is composed of four sections covering software functionality, service requirements, vendor attributes, and special company considerations.
Please enjoy the summary* below. Please visit our sponsor PTC for the full research (registration required).
Beyond these basics, there are special considerations for smaller companies and for the largest of enterprises. There are also special considerations for some industries. The guide addresses these and then goes beyond software functionality to focus on the entire experience of owning and operating the solution. The guide and associated checklists include product, infrastructure, implementation, service, and business requirements – all of which impact the benefits received and total cost of ownership (TCO) of PDM. The PDM Buyer’s Guide is not intended to provide an all-encompassing requirements list. Instead it covers the high points that manufacturers should look for in a PDM system. Think of this as a “PDM litmus test” to see if a solution is a good high-level fit for your business before spending significant time and effort analyzing detailed features and functions.
Although the checklists focus only on PDM requirements, it’s important to consider more than your current needs when choosing a system. Many companies eventually want to grow beyond basic PDM to a more complete PDM system. These more advanced capabilities are covered in our Expanding Beyond Your Outgrown PDM System Buyer’s Guide.
Other companies may start with PDM and evolve through a maturity process to a more complete Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment. PLM extends the core PDM foundation to support more product development and engineering processes, manage a richer view of products, include more people in product development, and support processes further upstream and downstream from Engineering in the product lifecycle.
In addition, PDM is becoming the core 3D foundation for the digital enterprise, supporting advanced initiatives like the Internet of Things (IoT), model-based design (MBD), and three dimensional augmented / virtual reality. Modern PDM / PLM systems should enable a product digital twin that can serve as the central foundation on which to consolidate (or view) a variety of product-related data captured in systems across the enterprise. It’s important to consider these needs when selecting your software and ensure that your solution has the capability to expand with your growing needs.
Can the most sophisticated manufacturing in the world get smarter? Join Julie Fraser in this session to challenge yourself. Consider what you don't already know in this session at Siemens Industry Software’s Realize Live virtual user conference. It is based on the paper Smart Manufacturing for Semiconductor she authored prior to joining Tech-Clarity. This session explores how exploding revenue opportunities come with challenges. To meet customer expectations and maintain margins, companies may need to adopt new approaches and technologies. This presentation has passed, please click here to watch the full session (registration required).
In the second part of this two-part blog series, Michelle Boucher continues to explore the question, should you consider an agile methodology to support new product development, beyond just software?
Proceeding from the first part, which explained what agile is and two reasons for using the agile methodology, the second part provides three more reasons to consider an agile methodology:
Tech-Clarity's eBook, Designing Smart Products Smartly: Increase the Maturity of Your Development Processes, explores this question. The combination of mechanics, electronics and software into today’s smart products have made them more responsive, adaptable, interconnected and portable than ever before. Incidentally, with customers expecting this type of technology in their products, the growth of smart products will not abate. Though smart products can create opportunities, they also introduce new challenges and complexity. To overcome these challenges, companies need to mature their development processes. This eBook reveals the steps manufacturers can take to mature their processes for designing smart products.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Dassault Systèmes (registration required).
But There Are Challenges
However, the advantages of smart products come at a cost. Developing complex, intelligent products brings inherent complexity. Multiple design disciplines must synchronize their work across different design life cycles. Multiple configuration options add even more complexity. Tech-Clarity research identifies several challenges created by increased complexity, but more importantly shows there can be significant, negative business impact (see graph). [1]
To overcome these challenges, companies need to raise the maturity of how they develop smart products. Fortunately, our research shows that better processes and enabling technology improve results through the use of a platform for integration, visibility, and traceability for smart product development. Digital transformation is a large piece of making these practices a success and enabling technologies such as the cloud, platforms, and modern design tools can make adoption easier. This paper outlines a number of tangible steps to improve the development of smart products with proven best practices, technology, and digital transformation.
In addition to best practices, companies should implement a lifecycle-oriented platform to enable a cohesive, transparent product development process across disciplines. These solutions allow companies to implement best practices to take advantage of the compelling benefits of smart products without suffering from costly, negative impacts to quality and time-to-market.
The introductory blog post of this two part series, defines the "waterfall" and "agile" methodologies. The post them reveals two of the five reasons to consider an agile methodology for your product development process:
What software tools do engineers need to support product design? Which capabilities will help engineers develop products that are higher quality, more personalized, more innovative, and lower in ownership cost?
These are challenging tasks to achieve that are further complicated due to increasing product complexity, engineering changes, and multiple engineering disciplines. However, with the correct software solution, the challenges can be surmounted during product design. Tech-Clarity's Buyer's Guide for Engineers: How to Select Essential Tools for Product Design can do just that by providing guidance to help you choose the right solution for your company.
This guide is a starting point for tackling those challenges. It provides a high-level overview of requirements for a complete, integrated product design suite. Tech-Clarity’s buyer’s guides look beyond software requirements to the other elements that help companies get value from their solutions. Consequently, it includes criteria for implementation, adoption, service, and vendor selection. Further, each section contains a checklist to support your software evaluation efforts.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full eBook, please visit our sponsor Siemens (registration required).
While the amount of embedded software in today’s products is growing, for the purposes of this guide, it was not considered part of the scope.
How can companies improve data management to avoid the five most common CAD design time wasters and win the engineering productivity challenge? Improving design data management maturity, enabled by PDM and PLM solutions, helps reduce non-value-added time and increase engineering productivity.
Please enjoy the summary* below. Please visit our sponsor Siemens for the full research (registration required).
Please also see the related Avoid Wasting Design Time infographic to learn more about CAD design time wasters.
Avoid Time-Wasting Traps through Better Practices
The time-wasting events highlighted in this eBook are some of the most common issues we find in our research, but they are only a sample. The key to avoiding wasteful traps and gaining more productive design time is adopting mature design data management practices. With these better practices in place, companies are more likely to be able to meet their product development targets and win the CAD design challenge.
Put in Place the Right Design Data Management Technology
Mature design data management goes hand-in-hand with design data management technology. It’s essential for companies to control, access, and share CAD data effectively whether the system they choose is basic PDM or a more capable PLM system.
Get Started, Take Advantage of the Benefits
Companies that don’t have an effective PDM or PLM system in place are putting their design efficiency – and more – at risk. Rising complexity across product, product development, and other dimensions is increasing data management challenges, the potential for issues, and the need for design data management systems. Even for small teams, these systems provide structure and value that helps drive better design and business performance so companies can win at the CAD design game.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. A link to download the full report is available above.
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the report, please contact us.
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What does it take for toolmakers to be competitive? What can mold makers do to improve their business?
Tech-Clarity's eBook, Breaking the Mold: How Toolmakers Are Transforming Operations to Stay Competitive explores these questions. The business of mold making is tough. Firstly, there is the time consuming bidding process where you need to provide an accurate, yet competitively priced bid and a realistic delivery date. However, many factors impact engineering and manufacturing, such as the quality of the part design, ability to manage cooling, and varied machining requirements. Significant effort is required and even small errors can significantly compromise profit margins. Despite the time and effort, mold makers, according to our survey respondents, only win 52% of the jobs they quote.
After winning the bid, a litany of further challenges await. Poor part designs, bottlenecks, complexity, changes, and more create obstacles to every business’s goal, profitability. How can toolmakers transform their operations to become more competitive and boost profitability? To answer this question, Tech-Clarity surveyed over 370 mold makers. This report reveals the results and provides recommendations to improve your business.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full report, please visit our sponsor Siemens (registration required).
Objectives for Competitiveness
How can you become even more competitive? Where should you focus? The graph shows the top five areas. At a high level, it is about keeping customers happy.
Quality
Ensuring the quality of your molds and the resulting parts can help you stand out from other mold shops. It gives customers a reason to do business with you. High quality helps you earn their loyalty because they know they'll be able to rely on you. However, injection molding is so complex, it is hard to predict exactly what will happen, so having the right systems and processes in place will help you catch problems as early as possible to ensure quality.
Cost
Cost is also critical. If you can keep your costs low, you can afford to be price competitive without compromising your profit margins. However, as with quality, you need to catch potential problems as early as possible to avoid expensive mold rework. Efficiency will also help keep development costs down.
Speed
Efficiency also helps you meet delivery dates. Customers desire short lead times, so removing bottlenecks will help you win more bids. Shorter cycle times also help. Shaving just a couple of seconds off can save your customer tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s certainly a reason for a customer to want to work with you!
Market Share and Cycle Time
The more customers you win over, the bigger your market share, which will boost your visibility and reputation to help you win even more business.
Based on this research and our experience, we recommend that Automotive companies:
Do your design tools hold product development back? With the pressures of global competition, and the never-ending struggle of bringing innovative, cost-effective products to market efficiently, a smooth product design process is paramount. Unfortunately, the vast majority of companies, 99%, report they experience design bottlenecks that hold them back, which consequently hurts their success and diminishes their profitability.
Tech-Clarity's research report, Empower Engineers with Cutting Edge Design Tools studied this further. The findings reveal an inherent deficiency in today’s design environments hurts collaboration across design teams, especially when they are geographically distributed or involve third-parties. On the other hand, modern infrastructures take advantage of the latest innovations to enable a smooth flow of information across locations and provide the competitive advantage businesses need to succeed.
By surveying 240 companies, Tech-Clarity has identified the primary sources of bottlenecks in the design process and their impacts on the company. A startling 99% reported that design bottlenecks can negatively affect the company in numerous ways, including delayed time-to-market, excess cost, and poor quality. This report explores these issues further and identifies how to solve the challenges associated with design bottlenecks.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full report, please visit our sponsor SOLIDWORKS (registration required).
Staying Competitive
To successfully develop competitive products, companies must focus on a variety of factors, especially product performance, innovation, and quality. Achieving this falls on the shoulders of engineers, but juggling so many different requirements makes the job tough. To achieve these goals, product development teams must be empowered to make the best design decisions efficiently. However, several factors stand in the way.
Limitations of Product Development Environments
To identify factors that slow down engineers, we asked survey respondents about the top challenges of today's design environments (see graph). Due to all the criteria engineers must think about, they need access to a lot of information. Unfortunately, poor integration across tools makes it hard to find what they need. It also means it’s hard to know about changes that impact other parts of the design. Plus, design information tends to be in a format that is not easy to share nor easy to understand, especially for staff with less technical knowledge. This limits opportunity because when more people provide input, you can explore more ideas. More ideas lead to superior innovation and improvements in usability, quality, and manufacturability. IT limitations also create challenges. It takes time to maintain all the different software tools. Also, hardware investments are costly.
These problems are so widespread, surprisingly, only 5% do not experience challenges with today's design environments. In other words, 95% of companies suffer from design environment challenges that lead to design bottlenecks and collaboration problems. Let's explore these challenges further to understand their impacts.
Based on industry experience and research for this report, Tech-Clarity offers the following recommendations:
How can companies achieve faster product development and higher profitability using the cloud? Join Jim Brown on an exciting webcast as he shares four key takeaways from his recent survey of over 300 companies. Jim will be joined by an Onshape founder who will share how Onshape customers take advantage of the cloud to improve product development performance.
Register for Onshape sponsored webcast now. (registration required)
Please also see our related survey results eBook, Accelerating Product Development in the Cloud.
What does effective storytelling have to do with succeeding with Industry 4.0? Plenty.
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What does effective storytelling have to do with succeeding with Industry 4.0? Plenty. With the right narrative by level and function, the whole company can engage with Industry 4.0 strategy. At that point, everyone, whether top-level management or shop-floor workers, can buy-in. Once they do, they can participate effectively in setting the standards required to…
How can schools best prepare today’s STEM students to close the engineering skills gap so that new graduates are ready for the real world? Tech-Clarity’s research report, “How Academia Can Close the Engineering Skills Gap in the Age of Digitalization” explores this question. This research shares a global perspective on what colleges and universities are…
What should supply chain-centric innovators consider when looking for PLM? How has the PLM landscape changed over the last several years, and how does SaaS fit into that picture? Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor, Upchain (registration required). Table of Contents The State of Cloud PLM Why Cloud SaaS is…
Where should mold makers focus to boost business profitability? With significant business pressures and the technical complexity of injection molding, mold making is a challenging business. While tool makers face many obstacles, those surveyed identified five top challenges that make it harder to maintain a successful business. This blog post reveals these top five challenges,…
How can manufacturers most effectively design, develop, and launch custom-engineered products that must be engineered to customer specifications? Tech-Clarity’s eBook, Bringing Custom-Engineered Products to Market, shares survey data from over 200 companies to offer insights and best practices. Please enjoy the summary* below. Click here for the full report, thank you to our sponsor Propel (registration…
Are your production approaches as smart as they are sophisticated? Before you answer, consider whether all the information about each aspect of the fab is readily available. Imagine the benefits in flexibility, quality, costs, agility, speed, confidence… this is the vision of smart manufacturing. To capture today’s myriad opportunities, these improvements are essential. The good…
What is needed for manufacturers to improve the maturity of BOM-related processes to help to manage complexity, improve efficiency, prevent mistakes, and enhance collaboration across departments and the supply chain? Read our buyer’s guide to find out. Please enjoy the summary below. Click here for the full report, thank you to our sponsor PTC. …
What do manufacturers need to know when they select a cloud Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution? Although manufacturers have started to adopt cloud solutions for many aspects of their business, PLM has lagged behind. Our research shows that over one-half of manufacturers are considering cloud and about one-quarter already leverage the cloud support product innovation…
Is structural analysis enough or should design engineers use CFD too? This guest post on the Siemens Solid Edge Blog explores this question. With product complexity increasing, it is harder than ever for engineers to make the right decision decisions. Complexity comes from the ever increasing amount of components, configurations, and electronics. Consequently, greater complexity…
What step are many companies missing to ensure their Industry 4.0 initiatives succeed? Why Strategy Matters to Industry 4.0 Success discusses the importance of enterprise strategy. The right strategy makes even pilot projects more likely to live up to their potential. This eBook talks about how thinking big for enterprise transformation makes initiatives more pragmatic….
How can you choose the right PDM system for your business to make sure you achieve your productivity, product success, and profitability goals? The product data management (PDM) Buyer’s Guide is a reference tool to provide direction on what to look for when selecting a PDM system for your company. This guide is composed of…
Can the most sophisticated manufacturing in the world get smarter? Join Julie Fraser in this session to challenge yourself. Consider what you don’t already know in this session at Siemens Industry Software’s Realize Live virtual user conference. It is based on the paper Smart Manufacturing for Semiconductor she authored prior to joining Tech-Clarity. This session…
In the second part of this two-part blog series, Michelle Boucher continues to explore the question, should you consider an agile methodology to support new product development, beyond just software? Proceeding from the first part, which explained what agile is and two reasons for using the agile methodology, the second part provides three more reasons…
How can companies mature their processes for designing smart products? Tech-Clarity’s eBook, Designing Smart Products Smartly: Increase the Maturity of Your Development Processes, explores this question. The combination of mechanics, electronics and software into today’s smart products have made them more responsive, adaptable, interconnected and portable than ever before. Incidentally, with customers expecting this type…
Can agile product development work beyond software? Agile has provided significant benefits to software development teams. Can those benefits be realized for other engineering disciplines too? In a guest post on the Siemens Solid Edge Blog, Michelle Boucher delves into these questions and the reasons you may want to consider using it to your product…
What software tools do engineers need to support product design? Which capabilities will help engineers develop products that are higher quality, more personalized, more innovative, and lower in ownership cost? These are challenging tasks to achieve that are further complicated due to increasing product complexity, engineering changes, and multiple engineering disciplines. However, with the correct…
How can companies improve data management to avoid the five most common CAD design time wasters and win the engineering productivity challenge? Improving design data management maturity, enabled by PDM and PLM solutions, helps reduce non-value-added time and increase engineering productivity. Please enjoy the summary* below. Please visit our sponsor Siemens for the full research (registration…
What does it take for toolmakers to be competitive? What can mold makers do to improve their business? Tech-Clarity’s eBook, Breaking the Mold: How Toolmakers Are Transforming Operations to Stay Competitive explores these questions. The business of mold making is tough. Firstly, there is the time consuming bidding process where you need to provide an accurate,…
Do your design tools hold product development back? With the pressures of global competition, and the never-ending struggle of bringing innovative, cost-effective products to market efficiently, a smooth product design process is paramount. Unfortunately, the vast majority of companies, 99%, report they experience design bottlenecks that hold them back, which consequently hurts their success and…
How can companies achieve faster product development and higher profitability using the cloud? Join Jim Brown on an exciting webcast as he shares four key takeaways from his recent survey of over 300 companies. Jim will be joined by an Onshape founder who will share how Onshape customers take advantage of the cloud to improve…
How can schools best prepare today's STEM students to close the engineering skills gap so that new graduates are ready for the real world?
Tech-Clarity’s research report, “