Making the value of technology clear
Jim Brown joined PTC’s VP of Strategy Partnership, Christine Wolff, to share his thoughts about improving field service by leveraging the IoT in episode 20 of PTC's Speaking of Service Podcast. Jim and “Wolffie” discuss the importance of service transformation given current economic conditions that make profitability and asset longevity crucial. 
Jim shares insights from his recent Buyer’s Guide including why to start with a business strategy instead of taking a technology-driven approach and shares seven areas companies can focus on to drive better service performance and profitability.
For more details from the podcast and how to achieve service transformation with the IoT, please see our Buyer’s Guide on Improving Service with IoT.
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[post_date] => 2023-08-28 09:00:57
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The cloud PLM transition is underway in the manufacturing industry. How should companies make the transition? I’m joining this webinar to share my latest research on SaaS PLM and discuss our PLM selection recommendations with Aras’ Bruce Bookbinder.
Whether your company is moving to SaaS PLM because it’s time to update your old system or for more strategic reasons like digital transformation (or both), it’s important to understand and prioritize the different kinds of value that the cloud can offer. We’ll discuss a variety of options and their implications on achieving business value.
Please join this Aras-sponsored webinar on September 14th at 10AM EST / 4PM CET.
For background information for the webinar or to learn more about the cloud PLM transition, please read our eBook: Seven Keys to Improving Service with the IoT. 
In these competitive times, continuous improvement is crucial, but it’s not always easy to pinpoint where the biggest benefits lie. How can you prioritize manufacturing improvement opportunities to ensure maximum value to the business? This Buyer’s Guide points to an array of software characteristics to support such decisions. You need digital means to support greater confidence in your decisions about which projects to fund when.
Please enjoy the summary below. For the full buyer’s guide please visit our sponsor, PTC (registration required).
For related content, A New Era of Continuous Improvement, shares results from manufacturers, consultants, and associations to validate the continuous improvement (CI) notions in the white paper; our eBook, Getting Beyond Percentages to Insights with OEE, shares insights on how your overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) metrics could accelerate improvement; and find out the difference between a typical continuous improvement program and one that's better in our Improving Continuous Improvement infographic.
This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. For the full research, please visit our sponsor PTC (registration required).
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the report, please contact us.
[post_title] => Confidently Prioritize Manufacturing Improvement Opportunities
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What most contributes to a supply chain having a positive impact on the business? Which disciplines and data sets make the most difference in supply chain resilience? Learn what Top Performers have to say about these that’s different. Julie Fraser, Tech-Clarity’s VP of Research for Operations and Manufacturing, will discuss initial findings of a soon-to-be released survey of 229 industry professionals. We will discuss supply chain findings including:
How can companies leverage the digital thread to grow their top line and market share through better customer experiences? Our new eBook teaches companies how to adapt people, processes, and technology to improve revenue and customer experiences by connecting the product digital thread from design through product commercialization.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Propel (registration required).
To learn how extending the digital thread into the customer experience can help, please read our earlier eBook: Extending Digital Threads to the Customer Experience.
Provide Consistent, Compelling Product Experience
One way to improve customer experiences, and business performance, is by feeding compelling, accurate, and consistent product experiences across channels to entice customers and influence their buying decisions. It’s important to recognize, however, that the job doesn’t end there. Experiences can’t be static. They have to evolve as products, messaging, customer needs, channels, and markets change and expand.
Digitally Transform the Product Experience Pipeline
Conveying consistent product experiences relies on speed and accuracy. Today’s processes, however, are typically manual, slow, disconnected, and error-prone. To drive growth, companies need reliable, trusted information as soon as it is available. It’s time to digitally transform the product information pipeline. Without this, companies can’t be fast and accurate enough to create compelling customer experiences that drive growth across channels and the product lifecycle.
Understand the Need / Priority
Most people recognize that designing a great product is only half of the job. They have to effectively bring them to market. Beyond the initial introduction, they also need to support channel growth. Ember Technologies, Inc. is a global company whose mission is to harness the power of temperature control to transform how the world eats, drinks and lives. “Ember started out strictly eCommerce, then added Amazon, before growing into a large retail business,” says Ember’s Siobhan Hunter. Rapid growth adds effort and complexity because companies with a trajectory like Ember must continue to provide consistent product experiences even as they expand to broader channels.
Recognize Broad Applicability
Consumer goods companies like Ember are more likely to have cross-departmental processes defined to link product design with commercialization. But even these companies typically have room for improvement. The evolution of the digital thread, however, applies to virtually every industry and channel. For example:
Agile Product Development: This approach applies the Agile methodologies that have been successful in software development to the entire product. Agile focuses on customer needs and providing value quickly. Work is completed in short intervals, or sprints, typically two weeks long, and validated along the way. The goal is to have a workable, high-quality product in less time. In contrast, the traditional Waterfall method waits until development work is complete before testing. Typically, teams then spend months fixing problems. An Agile approach could be particularly valuable for companies looking for high growth. For these customers, PTC suggests Onshape and Arena and David Katzman explained how these solutions support an Agile methodology.
Model-Based Digital Thread: With this approach, companies need the digital thread across the lifecycle. This supports traceability, reuse, efficiency, and a more disciplined approach. For companies that value this and profitability over growth, PTC recommends Creo and Windchill. PTC also reassures customers that all Creo data is upward compatible with Creo+.
Smart products have become increasingly critical to product success. In fact, Tech-Clarity's Profiting from Smart Products found that 86% of survey respondents indicated that smart products are important for their company's long-term success and profitability. PTC already supports this with PTC Integrity for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), including Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). However, with the acquisition of Codebeamer, PTC expands their solution to support software development for manufactured products with a cloud-ready solution. With software continuing to be a major innovation driver for today's modern products, this remains an important area for a complete product development solution.
PTC has several offerings to support product service, including PTC Arbortext for technical publications and service manuals, Servigistics for optimized spare parts management, and Vuforia. for 3D work instructions and augmented reality. PTC significantly expanded this portfolio by acquiring ServiceMax, the largest acquisition in its history. Neil Barua explained that ServiceMax supports field service operations. It keeps a record of prior issues, previous maintenance, and part replacements. The offering is further strengthened with ThingWorx to monitor the product fleet for more predictive and preventative maintenance.
Integrated workflows with Ansys Granta, a Materials Information Management solution (Ansys Materials), Creo, and Windchill, will allow engineers to assess the impact of different materials on performance, recyclability, and carbon footprint. Ansys CEO Ajei Gopal also joined Jim Hepplemann on stage to discuss the strength of their partnership in other ways to support for digital transformation and simulation-driven design with continued and tighter integrations across products lines including Windchill and Ansys Minerva.
PTC and aPriori are also planning for greater interoperability between aPriori, Creo, and Windchill so that engineers can leverage aPriori to assess cost, manufacturability, and sustainability. Engineers will be able to understand their impact on the manufacturing footprint and cost as the design evolves. aPriori's software will also make improvement recommendations.
Beyond these expanded partnerships, PTC signed the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) commitment letter, pledging to reduce near-term emissions reductions and meet long-term net-zero targets.
We look forward to hearing how these investments offer PTC customers even more value. Thanks to Coray Thibaut de Maisieres, and Ernestine Tiongson for hosting us at PTC LiveWorx 2023.
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Machine builders must continuously raise the bar to compete in today's dynamic, global markets. How are they leveraging digital twins to improve how they quote, design, produce, install, and commission more complex, smart, connected, flexible, and tailored equipment than ever? Further, how can they extend their digital twins to improve installation, commissioning, and service?
Please enjoy the summary below and visit our sponsor Siemens to learn more about machine builder digital twins and other solutions for machine builders. You can also download the full eBook to learn more.
For related research, please read Increasing Equipment Design Velocity and Increasing Performance Engineering Performance.
Digital Twin Potential
Machine builders must continuously raise the bar to compete in today's dynamic, global markets. How are they leveraging digital twins to improve how they quote, design, produce, install, and commission more complex, smart, connected, flexible, and tailored equipment than ever? Further, how can they extend their digital twins to improve installation, commissioning, and service
Increase Digital Twin Maturity to Drive Value
Digital twin improvement opportunities span the product lifecycle and offer significant new business value from bids through service. Our research shows that top-performing manufacturers use more advanced, mature digital twin capabilities.1 But few machine builders have tapped the full potential.
Continuous improvement through a comprehensive digital twin spanning the lifecycle is valuable, but it is a journey. There is plenty of room for most manufacturers to improve and drive increased profitability, but they can't do it all at once. Instead, they can implement the basics and find ways to expand the value through higher maturity at each step. This eBook introduces four areas where machine builders can improve their digital twins, sharing a combination of first steps and more advanced actions to drive business value and increase profitability.
Focus on People and Process
The end goal is a better way of doing business, an integrated design and development process supported by the machine digital twin. To achieve this vision, make sure to get key people and departments aligned with the vision and the transformation. Help them understand the big picture, the steps to achieve it, and how it will help them in addition to helping the company.
Enable the Transition
New ways of working require the right tools. It's essential to evaluate your current software solution portfolio to ensure they are sufficient for the job. An effective machine digital twin requires support from a variety of engineering solutions, including CAD, multiphysics CAE, software design, and PLM. It also requires industrial and factory automation solutions, including CAM, MES, HMI, SCADA, virtual commissioning, and the IIoT. Depending on maturity, it may also require asset lifecycle and service management solutions (ALM and SLM).
Think Holistically
It's important to consider more than individual tools. Evaluating how solutions work together to support the digital thread across the lifecycle is crucial. The machine digital twin is best served by a platform of solutions that work together. The platform should provide a central data model, the digital twin backbone, kept in configured context. It should be able to be acted on from different angles so everyone can contribute and get what they need in a secure, collaborative environment. Together, these product innovation platform capabilities support the machine digital twin.
It's essential to acknowledge, though, that no single platform will support every need. It's critical that the platform is open to allow integration and offers the capability to develop new applications that pull information together for specific purposes, ideally in a no-code or low-code environment.
Let’s Get Started
There are many options and a lot to do, but the value should come fast and be extended over time. Let's get started.
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PLM conferences are back, and it seems there’s a conference a week right now! The first one I attended this Spring was Aras’ ACE conference. This
was a special one for me because it was my first time attending in person. I was planning to attend in 2020 but it was canceled due to the pandemic, and this event marked the first in-person ACE since 2019. You could feel, and hear, the energy and excitement customers and Aras employees shared about being back in person as you walked the halls and the exhibit floor. It was a large and excited crowd of customers and partners eager to share information and experience with each other and learn from Aras.
Other than the excitement of the event and the enthusiastic customer support, there are several main things I took away from the conference:
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[post_content] => I feel rejuvenated after a briefing with Apprentice. Their Tempo suite is a fresh approach that marries the latest enterprise mobile and SaaS technologies with composable applications for pressing industry issues. Yes, there’s a SaaS MES – but there is more for the plant, quality lab, enterprise, and manufacturing network. It serves the product lifecycle, starting with preclinical and clinical.
The company came into being in 2014. The founders saw the industry move toward large molecule and personalized products, and they predicted the resulting radical changes in the structure of the industry. They believed older software could not support production needs such as faster changes, higher mix, continuous processes, demanding processes to grow and culture biologics, and tight collaboration with contract manufacturers. So they leveraged the most modern B2B SaaS technologies to develop the GMP-compliant Tempo Manufacturing Cloud.
The latest addition to the Tempo suite is Connected Manufacturing Network, to connect internal and external sites and teams. Capabilities include product lifecycle, enterprise recipe management, external manufacturing collaboration, and streamlined tech transfer. This real-time data-sharing capability could revolutionize how biopharma companies manage global and CMO operations.
The Tempo product line started with Tandem Virtual Collaboration, a connected worker platform with headset. Augmented Work Instructions for EBR, Procedures management, line clearance, training, and an electronic logbook came from that foundation. MES includes built-in quality, no-code procedure and recipe authoring, and enforcement. LES for the quality lab leverages some of the strengths of the MES but tailored for scientific testing and managing samples, materials, and equipment.
Apprentice.io has been growing rapidly for the past five years and has just raised another VC round to keep that momentum going. Like the company itself, their team of VCs includes both traditional high tech and life-science-focused investment companies.
I now understand how a company less than a decade old got on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the second year in a row and moved into the visionary quadrant. The time appears to be right to infuse the most modern B2B software capabilities into the biopharma production process.
Thank you, Kristen Kucks and Marie Forshaw, for taking the time to get me up to speed!
What most contributes to supply chain resiliency? What are the challenges and impacts of doing it well? Can better collaboration, cadence, or technology improve manufacturers' capability to respond to disruptions? What does it take to recover with operational continuity and minimal negative impact? What is the role of departments beyond Supply Chain?
Tech-Clarity is conducting research on these topics right now. Julie Fraser, Tech-Clarity’s VP of Research for Operations and Manufacturing, will discuss what questions are included and why. We will explore these topics:
[post_title] => Supply Chain Resiliency: Taking the Road Less Traveled
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How can manufacturers improve manufacturing engineering? We surveyed 177 people directly involved with manufacturing engineering and found that modernizing processes and technology drives higher manufacturing engineering productivity and performance. These improvements are crucial to profitability in the industrial equipment industry as customers demand high quality, more personalized products at increasingly faster time to market; all despite rising product and manufacturing complexity.
Survey results show that Top Performers waste less time on non-value-added activities, find issues sooner, and spend less on physical prototypes. They accomplish this through best practices, including more advanced collaboration and communication methods and increased use of 3D and simulation, to plan and validate manufacturing operations with digital twins.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Dassault Systèmes DELMIA (registration required).
This eBook shares additional data analysis and insights for the industrial equipment industry from our Transforming Manufacturing Engineering with Virtual Build research. Watch this three-part on-demand webinar series with Jim Brown to learn how manufacturers can improve manufacturing engineering and technology.
Manufacturing is more complex than ever. Complexity has increased in three areas; products, manufacturing processes, and markets. Today’s products are offered with increasing numbers of variants and configuration options and require a combination of mechanical, electrical, and software components. Today’s production may include industrial additive manufacturing capabilities, and involves increased automation. In addition, increasing demand for automation and new power sources including electric, hydrogen, and solar are accelerating the rate of change in the industrial equipment industry. Finally, manufacturers are shifting production and reshoring as the industry is trying to cope with supply chain issues. Despite these, manufacturing engineers need to decrease cycle times and improve quality.
Challenges Reflect Lack of Ability to Visualize, Data Challenges
Manufacturing engineers must overcome significant challenges to design and validate production processes. The most commonly reported challenge is the inability to visualize assembly processes. This makes it challenging for planners to optimize process plans and provide feedback on manufacturability. The inability to experience production virtually leads to the need for time-consuming, costly physical mockups.
They also report challenges with obtaining accurate, timely product design data which limits the ability for manufacturing engineers to work in parallel to shorten time to market. Finally, respondents report challenges with the time required to build prototypes, their ability to capture knowledge for reuse, and optimizing complex processes.
Too Much Wasted Time
Survey respondents identified manufacturing engineering inefficiency as both a challenge and profitability requirement. Researchers further inquired about the amount of manufacturing engineering time that participants estimate their companies spend on non-value-added activities, including:
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[post_content] => We’ve been talking about operationalizing innovation for some time. It’s a crucial need because, as our research shows, innovation for products and services is among the top factors driving long-term business success. It can’t be left to organic inspiration or luck. It must be targeted and driven to provide a repeatable, scalable market advantage that drives profitable growth.
But what does it take to operationalize innovation? After a recent call with Sopheon, I’m happy to see there is effort being put into this question. Sopheon is supporting an initiative to define and support “InnovationOps” to serve the same role as DevOps, SecurityOps, or other approaches to take innovation to the next level. Unlike most software companies, they aren’t taking a “not invented here” approach. Instead, they are pulling together leaders in innovation practice and theory to help further the concept.
I suspect they will use what they learn to help drive their product strategy, which as I’ve written previously, has been extended to cover a broader set of processes than their traditional portfolio management solution alone. It’s a win-win, and an exciting idea that should provide a strong framework for companies to improve innovation value, speed, and efficiency.
Thank you Greg Coticchia, Mike Bauer, and Paul Heller for sharing the concept with me and inviting me to participate in the roundtables.
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[post_content] => Jim Brown and I are jazzed up after learning about how Elisa IndustrIQ is combining the data management and analytics of the parent telco to strengthen already successful manufacturing applications. This combination of data structures, analytics algorithms for AI and ML, and applications that serve specific industries’ needs can deliver very high value. Elisa IndustrIQ is making its modular solution available in a way that also leverages data from outside the suite to make it even more valuable and broadly applicable.
A true digital transformation changes or extends the business model, and Finnish telco Elisa has done just that. It recognized that its analytics and automation to run the telco could apply to optimizing manufacturing. They also realized that embedding this into applications that solve real business issues would boost the customer’s value. So, for the past few years, it has been building and acquiring manufacturing applications to address manufacturing challenges, including production speed, connected supply chain, skilled workforce, climate change, and cybersecurity.
Their research showed that increased agility in production would be paramount to manufacturers’ success. Acquisitions have fueled the depth of the company’s applications and geographic spread of manufacturing-savvy people and customers:
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[post_content] => It’s exciting when you see a company reinvent themselves to take on an important, unsolved problem in the industry. That’s exactly what Actify has done. We’ve been following them from the time of their early, very successful CAD viewer product line SpinFire through their new evolution to create a holistic solution for automotive project management. What they’ve done opens up a new era of solutions for program managers working for automotive suppliers, and likely for other industries to follow.
I can hear people saying “there are already lots of project management tools on the market.” True. There are also lots of PLM solutions to manage data, cloud storage solutions to manage files, and collaboration solutions to manage…well…collaboration. But automotive program management needs all of those things, and all but the biggest companies have trouble implementing and integrating all of those capabilities. What Actify has done is build a solution that is tailor-made for program managers. It not only manages documents and collaboration - it manages these in the context of an automotive program. During the demonstration, we noted how the tasks maintain the context of the program, for example a DFMEA, so managing the schedule and the work to be done are joined in one place to avoid the need for program managers to manually connect status, schedules, and work objects.
Top tier automotive suppliers live and die by their OEM relationships and the profitability of their programs. To support this, program management has evolved as a unique and critical discipline. Actify has even coined a new phrase, “Make to Program,” that reflects the unique manufacturing style and processes they support in the automotive supply chain. It’s nice to see someone developing tools that are built to work specifically for them. Especially at a time with so many new programs and the dramatic change as the automotive industry electrifies.
Thank you Peter West, Bob Anson, and Charisse Dalton for spending time and sharing the progress toward your vision with me, Julie, and Michelle.
[post_title] => Actify Offers Program Management Solution for Automotive Suppliers (insight)
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[post_content] => How can life sciences manufacturers accelerate their innovation? One way is by recognizing and creating an operational digital twin that’s connected to MES. We will discuss:
For related research, read our Accelerate Life Sciences Innovation with Operations Digital Twin eBook.
[post_title] => Accelerate Manufacturing and Time to Market in Life Sciences
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Current economic conditions make service profitability and asset longevity more important than ever. How can service organizations leverage the IoT to transform service and improve service performance and profitability? This Buyer’s Guide offers seven ways that can help companies get started or expand on early efforts, apply lessons learned from initial projects, and drive repeatable value that they can grow over time.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full buyer’s guide please visit our sponsor, PTC (registration required).
For related research, view our Improve Service with Equipment Monitoring infographic.
IoT Condition Based Monitoring Opportunities
Monitoring machines using the IoT offers significant business value including increased quality, manufacturing throughput, and service performance. Of these opportunities, transforming service has become a proven way to improve equipment performance and profitability in the field and in the factory.
Service transformation is a good target because service organizations have increased their maturity in the last decade and are now more sophisticated and data-driven. In addition, IoT platforms are now available to ensure companies get beyond a “proof of concept” to improve performance and profitability at scale. And as Dr. Yuri Hovanski, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Brigham Young University (BYU), explains, “Companies have been using predictive maintenance for decades. It’s not new, but the cost to deploy it 20 years ago was phenomenally expensive.” The barriers to adopt these platforms continue to drop as solution providers offer more configurable, predefined applications that are faster and less expensive to implement.
Adopt a Pragmatic Approach
Companies have to get started, but they shouldn’t try to accomplish everything at once. Instead, it’s essential to adopt an incremental approach. Companies can organize their service and machine monitoring efforts in small, manageable, incremental “sprints” that will result in broader, transformational value. Each effort should build on the prior one. Companies should create a framework as they solve the first problem, focusing on operationalizing their capabilities and building repeatable solutions.
Extend the Value
As companies become more experienced and data-centric, they can increase the maturity of their service applications and analytics. They can apply results in their own facilities to improve how they service smart products at customer locations. They can extend to other use cases such as customer self-service, remote maintenance, predicting yield, optimizing manufacturing processes, predicting scrap/rework, or reducing process variability. There is a lot of value available across the enterprise and the value chain in addition to improving service.
This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. For the full research, please visit our sponsor PTC (registration required).
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the report, please contact us.
[post_title] => Seven Keys to Improving Service with the IoT
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[post_content] => Are the next steps of IT/OT convergence at hand? Siemens would say yes. IT and OT are blending more than ever in some new offerings under an umbrella of data-driven manufacturing.
Siemens just announced the expansion of their Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) framework into Industrial Operations X. Industrial Operations X includes Industrial IoT, Industrial Edge, and Mendix Low-code technologies. The focus is on making it easier to integrate manufacturing IT (such as MES, HMI/SCADA) and OT (such as PLCs, DCS, and other automation). Siemens aims to deliver more flexible, interoperable, scalable, and open solutions. If they succeed, it should lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Software-defined automation for speed and ease of converging IT and OT is another angle. News there includes the virtual PLC, an S7-1500 controller with no hardware to install. Another breakthrough is configuring OT with modern IT tools such as GitHub and text-based programming. Beyond bringing their products together, Siemens intends to help transform manufacturing engineering processes. With the skills shortage, this may be crucial.
They also announced that the IIoT platform MindSphere will be called Insights Hub starting this week. Insights Hub is one domain capability within Industrial Operations X. The foundation for all other Insights Hub applications is an app called Monitor. Other apps include OT such as SIMATIC Energy Manager and Manage MyMachines as well as new ones in IT such as OEE, Quality Prediction (combining asset and process data to feed a machine learning model), and Asset Health and Maintenance.
Siemens explains that this set of announcements is the beginning of a journey. Clearly, it expands the ecosystem they started with Industrial Edge. New IoT-based applications are in the works both from Siemens and from partners and customers leveraging low-code capabilities. HANNOVER MESSE is always a big time for Industry 4.0 announcements, and Siemens always has a big presence. Thank you Jon Heidorn, Raymond Kok, and Roland Melzer for delivering us a preview of these announcements. We look forward to following the continued convergence of Siemens’ automation and software offerings to enable manufacturers to accelerate their success.
[post_title] => Siemens Advances IT/OT Convergence with Industrial Operations X (Insight)
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