Looking to develop and strengthen your extended enterprise ecosystems? You’ll need to digitally transform. Industry ecosystems require a massive amount of change – meaning new ways of thinking, connecting, and collaborating – which require access to a precious and often misunderstood resource – product data.
Product data is one of the critical differentiators for supply chains right now. If you want your extended enterprise ecosystem to be resilient and adaptive to constantly changing market and business dynamics, now is the time to rally behind it. Most organizations think it’s simply about connecting what is siloed. But this requires new processes and a willingness to disrupt your standard operating procedures and let go of working with comfortable, yet outdated tools. This product data needs to be liberated and become open, yet secure enough to move throughout the enterprise - both forwards and backward. This means tapping into data that was created during development and manufacturing, as well as tapping into the product data that continues to be generated as the product is operated by your customers.
Here comes the resistance
You will undoubtedly face resistance when you dive into a digital transformation initiative like this. It begins as soon as you start understanding the complexity of where product data is created, how many systems your organization uses to generate that data (spoiler alert – most of it is generated outside of systems you invested in years ago – thank you Excel and Word); even more difficult is how to make it accessible to others. (Do you feel your culture is open and collaborative – or are you weaponizing data against each other for protection against your own failings?) And if this isn’t hard enough, if you really want to understand and use product data as a competitive advantage, it means connecting to products outside of your control, asking permission, creating new business models and user agreements, new ways of thinking on not just gaining access to this information, but collaborating with customers continuously. Are you really open to that or are you resistant?
Change happens. Accept it. This is where digitally transforming your organization gets real very fast. And causes trepidation as you go through the stages of accepting change. It’s exciting to kick off a digital transformation project, but when reality hits, is the organization empowered to make the hard decisions to make it all work? Mark Reisig, VP of Product Marketing put this in context in “What Must Change: Overcoming Obstacles on a Digital Business Transformation Platform.”
You must be prepared to remove complicated barriers (resistance) and build a better organization that can embrace change (resilience). Usually, this type of approach is required when an organization is backed up against a wall (e.g., poor performance, leading to leadership that needs to get the share price back up again). Is your organization prepared to make these seismic shifts to avoid a problem in the first place? You can, with digital transformation.
The key? Building resilience and agility into your organization to embrace and enable change – and faster than your competitors. Big digital transformation projects are out, continuous, incremental transformations are in. Incremental change lowers the risk of failure by demonstrating a better return on investment (ROI) and time to value (TTV). Additionally, smaller, more frequent successes convince people to adopt and contribute to a culture of continuous change.
The value of a resilient industry ecosystem
Do you want to know what makes people move from resistant to resilient? Making product data and its status available to the right people at the right time. There is some great research from Accenture, “Think thread first: Surf the wave of Product Data” that articulates the value created when wrangling in product data and making it available within an industry ecosystem. The list below contains some of the data included in the Accenture research cited above.
Improve accessibility to key product information turning a typical PLM transformation project cost into a valuable asset and foundation can lead to the following benefits:
- Parts are analytically evaluated prior to migration, allowing standardization and deduplication recommendations, reducing the burden on the new solution
- Engineering data forms the core of a new Digital Thread prior to the platform coming online creating new opportunities for value
- Data used for migration is made accessible to service teams that are now able to make better decisions and improve customer outcomes
Create the Thread: “The objective of the Digital Thread—in its purest form—is to integrate data across all steps of the product development lifecycle, i.e., across engineering, manufacturing, operations, and management. Companies must look beyond narrow, function-specific definitions and broaden their discussions to include more data sources. And they must take advantage of cloud to facilitate the necessary integration.” (Hey we have that! It’s called Aras Enterprise SaaS.)
Accenture’s analysis of companies that have merged the data supporting a product’s lifecycle create the following operational efficiencies:
- 20%–40% reduction in costs for data duplication and overlapping toolsets
- Up to 5x the speed of data capture and curation through thread automation
- 2–3x data reuse through cross-functional access to data
- 15–40% improvement in time to market via enhanced design team coordination
- 10–50% reduction in product renovation activities through data-driven design
What you need to build a resilient ecosystem
While it’s true we’re experiencing a resurgence in PLM, don’t think that since you have a PLM system already that it’s the answer to your digital transformation needs. Why? It’s so old! We proved this without a reasonable doubt, and it’s time to move forward if you want to succeed in developing an industry ecosystem. Rigid and inflexible PLM software won’t cut it in the future. You can no longer afford to spend millions to customize it, only to get stuck on an unsustainable release. You can’t expect those same engineers to use older technology without secure in-context collaboration with manufacturing and service. The future demands that PLM is built on a resilient platform, or as Gartner, IDC, and CIMdata have defined it - a Product Innovation Platform. A Product Innovation Platform offers the ability to configure, customize, and build applications the PLM provider doesn’t have – all while staying upgraded to the latest release.
Let me be clear, customers move toward faster time-to-value with business-ready SaaS solutions. This approach empowers them to have the flexibility to sustainably customize applications to meet today’s, and tomorrow’s business requirements. Customizations are not riskier or more costly if the platform provides guaranteed upgrades, which are in fact the greatest means to adapt and optimize your PLM system.
A successful product innovation platform is not a portfolio of products without an end-to-end digital thread. It’s also not one without digital twins—accurate, up-to-date replicas of your assets in the field. It is one that enables you to collaborate across your enterprise with different types of data. You can customize PLM applications, build industrial-grade applications on the platform, and run them securely with performance and scalability from the cloud. Furthermore, it should provide you with the option to have it hosted as a SaaS offering – with upgrades, including customizations, on your schedule.
Make the move. Read the eBook, "How to Remove 5 Obstacles to Digital Transformation" to get started.
