What makes a digital thread that weaves through manufacturing possible? The answer is: operational data management, which includes a host of capabilities to connect, collect, contextualize, and make data flow across offices, plants, and the field. ThingWorx, a PTC Technology, has been doing that for years, and we recently had an update briefing on version 10.0. Working with customers, PTC continues to improve, evolve, and expand the platform.
Platform for IIoT and More
ThingWorx is an established and widely used industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform. PTC claims over 2800 customers trust it, including over half of the Fortune 500. It also has an impressive ecosystem of partners with thousands of developers. It is widely used in industrial equipment, automotive, aerospace and defense, and medical technology companies.
Our research shows that having data available and ready to use is the most common challenge for AI projects. Together with Kepware connectors, ThingWorx can bridge to nearly any on-prem, edge, and cloud data to enable an industrial digital thread. Beyond connectivity, the ThingModel ensures the data is in context. Other keys to gaining value are the ability to build mash-up solutions and dashboards or other visualizations. These can help the manufacturers’ teams solve specific issues and analyze the complex data sets that the platform puts into context. 
Evolving Solutions
On top of the platform, PTC has built a set of interesting solutions. These leverage the ThingWorx platform for data management, but go well beyond. These pre-built solutions deliver specific, targeted capabilities.
- Real Time Production Performance Monitoring includes interactive dashboards showing production KPIs as they change.
- Asset Monitoring and Utilization is often the basis for a profitable service or product-as-a-service (PaaS) business for equipment makers whose products have a long lifecycle in the field.
- The Connected Work Cell (CWC) delivers digital work instructions and guidance. It helps ensure that entire high-mix and high-volume work areas are coordinated and working effectively. PTC says over 80 sites already use it, with double-digit benefits in productivity, training time, and scrap.
- Digital Performance Management (DPM) supports continuous improvement and boosts overall throughput effectiveness (OTE), leveraging time savings as the key to comparable and business-meaningful performance reporting.
- Windchill Navigate enables product engineers to access useful data in ThingWorx without leaving the PLM. The latest release also improves work instruction availability for plant employees based on Windchill product data.
- Accelerators for smart connected products (SCP), generative AI, and analytics are predefined configurations or starter applications that customers can customize for their needs.
New in Version 10
During the MLC Rethink conference, PTC released ThingWorx Version 10. We were particularly impressed with IoT Streams, which deliver fast access to time-series industrial data from anywhere in the company. To do this, ThingWorx 10.0 aligns with Kafka and soon, MQTT, for data flows, contextualizes the data. Upcoming releases enable it to feed into a data lake or AI model. PTC is partnering with Databricks and Microsoft Fabric on this. We see this as a crucial improvement for industrial DataOps.
Performance enhancements include better caching, better server scalability, and reduced response times. Security upgrades to TLS, Tomcat, and Java are designed to meet the needs of regulated industries such as federal contractors and medical devices. The 10.0 version also updates analytics and integration with genAI tools[AT1] [AT2] , and includes a native debugger to boost development productivity.
Customer Examples
ThingWorx has many fascinating customer examples of business value.
- MedTech company Elekta delivers PaaS using ThingWorx. It found that its connected assets are utilized 3X more than non-connected assets. It can now resolve 30% of issues remotely and performs hundreds of preventative actions each year.
- One large manufacturer has deployed nearly 1000 ThingWorx applications and saved almost $1M with diverse detection capabilities.
- Manufacturers in automotive supply and medical contract manufacturing use the DPM solution to digitize and accelerate their continuous improvement efforts.
- Bridgestone uses ThingWorx for systematic performance optimization, with ThingWorx for data contextualization and DPM to optimize complex operations such as splicing.
Looking Forward
Clearly, the original scope of ThingWorx as an IIoT Platform is central, but it keeps growing. Solutions and accelerators are becoming more robust and scalable with users’ input. As most software providers today, AI is a significant focus for the roadmap.
Our key takeaway is that ThingWorx with Kepware for industrial connectivity has grown to be more capable as an industrial data management and data operations platform than we’d realized. All the essentials are there and being improved regularly. This makes ThingWorx a capable platform for AI and applications using an array of industrial and enterprise data.
Thank you, Ayush Tiwari, for taking the time to brief Julie Fraser and Rick Franzosa on the latest for ThingWorx. We look forward to following your continued progress in the market.
