As lots of new innovative products are launched on the market, many manufacturers are struggling to cope with the market trends, as their product development is still managed using an outdated approach. To remain competitive in this era, Product manufacturers need to adopt digitization, which enables them to increase their engineering efficiency and speed up the design cycle.
Unaware of digital transformation’s potential benefits, some organizations are keeping away from it just because of the cost involved and complexity. As a result, they are losing the edge over their competitors. Effective implementation of such transformation will align and integrate key resources and functions of the organization effectively resulting in faster “Time to Market”.
Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is a business approach of using cutting-edge technologies to overcome both common and unusual company difficulties while also creating new growth prospects. It may include operations, supply chains, systems, and smart-linked products. Digital Transformation unlocks value and creates a competitive advantage in the world of distributed product development, manufacturing, and service.
The backbone of such digital transformation is PLM (product lifecycle management), so it begins with the implementation of the PLM system. PLM is the core of the product development process, and it aligns it with manufacturing, Purchasing, services, and many more.
Why PLM First?
Product Lifecycle Management is the process that enables management and tracking of all the product-related data, right from the ideation, development, launch, and service through its retirement. PLM serves as a single source of truth and helps manufacturers capture their product progress with ease. PLM enables geographically distributed, multidisciplinary teams to have real-time coordination by utilizing up-to-date product information, thus increasing efficiency and productivity.
The effectiveness of a company’s digital transformation is determined by how successfully the PLM software integrates and links through numerous data sources, as well as how well it breaks down information silos. Finally, this coincides with the company’s aims of growing revenue, lowering expenses, cutting time-to-market, and delivering higher-quality products.
PLM seamlessly integrates with CAD software and captures all the necessary data Such as BOM, material, and many more. Such data will be effectively managed and shared with other systems like ERP, Digital Manufacturing, CRM, and SLM. Feedback from customers or quality departments can also be captured and stored. Changes resulting from feedback can be implemented and shared across all the other enterprise systems.
PLM also transforms organizations’ traditional business processes into digital workflows. This allows the design department to align with other departments like purchase, manufacturing, and quality before production release.
These distinct features and capabilities make PLM the first thing to embrace in any digital transformation.
Benefits of PLM
1. Increased productivityPLM implementation significantly helps in increasing productivity by minimizing time consumed by data duplications, working in silos, dealing with scattered data, manual data handling, overnight data synchronization processes and so on. 2. Faster Time to MarkeCentralized data in PLM ensures faster product development time. Working in collaboration helps design teams to work more efficiently and quickly transfer design data to manufacturing. 3. Single Source of Truth One of the major advantages of PLM is that it allows storage of data from all the data sources in a single system, thus anyone working on product development or operations is less likely to be working on outdated data at a given point in time. 4. Better quality of product Well-established and ready-to-use change management processes in PLM help in rectifying erroneous parts quickly even when the product is in the manufacturing phase. This is especially important in the case of teams spread across diverse locations. 5. Reduced error Powerful PLM software promotes data reuse and demotes data delicacies thus limiting errors to a greater extent. Predefined workflow processes in PLM applications eradicate the errors that occur in the release workflow process. 6. Decrease product cost PLM efficiently supports cross-product or platform data sharing thereby aiding the feasibility analysis and applicability of existing data reuse. The potential use of collaborative design opens the possibility of reducing both material and manufacturing costs.
Digital Transformation Methodologies
Here are some of the proven digital transformation methodologies to embrace the Digital transformation journey:
1. Strategic Enterprise Systems
Digital transformation starts with the digitization of an organization’s proprietary process into strategic systems such as ERP, PLM, CRM, SLM, etc. Conversion of traditionally maintained and tracked non-digital processes into digital ones lays a strong foundation. It helps organizations to digitally monitor and track real-time data at a given point in time. Such well-implemented digital transformation systems drive greater business efficiency and growth.
2. Digital Thread
The term digital thread refers to the connectivity between strategic systems of an organization. Linking data of strategic enterprise systems to both upstream and downstream systems establishes cross-system data sharing digitally at ease. Digital thread enables single-point access to all data stored in different strategic systems. It also greatly reduces the chances of manual error while transferring data from one system to the other.
3. Digital Twin
Digital twin is a virtual model of a physical component that resembles its characteristics. The performance of physical components in real-world operation is captured using various means, like sensors, cameras, manual test feedback, and so on. This critical information is fed back to the virtual part to mimic the physical component’s behavior. And then perform various analyses and simulations for further enhancements in the component. The outcome of the study is then implemented in the physical counterpart for real-world testing. This cycle goes on until targeted performance is achieved. This enables organizations to produce final products that perform as expected in real-life scenarios.
Maintenance and servicing information from physical components in operation can also be fed to virtual models for product enhancements.
4. Digital Environment
On-premises PLM environments need sophisticated and high-end servers and setups. This also demands expensive inventory for any unplanned scaling and disaster management. With recent developments in the cloud world, companies can overcome these challenges and save significant upfront costs using the flexibility offered by cloud infrastructure. This can be achieved by either completely moving the setup to the cloud or partially. Cloud infrastructures offer infinite configurations to suit any requirement at any point in time, thus it makes it the right choice for any type or kind of organization.
Conclusion
The success of digital transformation depends highly on the selection of the right PLM system and the seamless integration of enterprise systems to attain organizational Goals. With market trends changing and growing exponentially, digital transformation is no longer a one-time activity. Failing to harness and adapt to the trend is a missed opportunity that might have a long-lasting impact on organizational growth.
Selection and planning of the digital transformation journey start with a thorough analysis of legacy processes, legacy applications, business requirements, pain points, forecasts, business goals, and so on. All the artifacts gathered are clearly understood and mapped to architect the solution that meets the ultimate goal. This is a critical phase of the implementation that can only be achieved with expert opinions and recommendations. Strategic partnerships with the experts of the domain are the best way to achieve exceptional results as both parties work on their own domain expertise and benefit mutually.
Book a meeting with us, to begin your Digital Transformation journey.
