Staying in tune with customer needs requires close communication and coordination in the manufacturing industry.
Design, manufacturing, service and engineering must work together to meet challenges and take advantage of disruptive trends.
Product lifecycle management (PLM) plays a vital role in this. But, it can’t thrive without these four fundamental digital transformation strategies.
1. Use the best enterprise systems
Your business probably deals with lots of highly interrelated data from its ERP, CRM and PLM systems.
The best of those enterprise systems will ensure that the data they interact with can be used for specific purposes across all of your departments.
For instance, in discrete manufacturing, digital transformation will usually begin with the product being modelled by CAD software. The data generated from this process is then used for strategic processes in design, service and manufacturing.
Enterprise systems that maintain product data throughout its lifecycle will save businesses time and maximise the value of that information.
2. Establish virtual collaboration
Digital threads play a vital role in digital transformation.
They establish a virtual collaboration platform by enabling enterprise systems to share data. In turn, the time taken to prepare data is reduced, and all manual handover over of data is removed from the process.
The presence of a digital thread also gives way to a new modern product development technique - the digital twin.
Once you have a digital thread, you can create a digital twin, which is a digital model that represents a physical counterpart. It can be used for products and processes and provides insight into how tangible version is likely to respond if put into action in the real world.
Once the physical counterpart exists, field data can be collected and sent back to your engineering team, thus contributing directly to improved product design.
This element of digital transformation enables improvements to be made that will directly impact product quality before anything is put into production.
There are many ways you can deploy digital systems, from cloud-based to on-premise and even a hybrid of the two.
To ensure you’re ready for digital transformation, you need to approach digital deployment in a way that benefits your business. That means choosing the right types of system that provide an optimal setup, both operationally and from a security standpoint.
System monitoring and migration are also critical factors to enable high levels of output, but so too is the ability for your tech stack to scale with you.
It all starts with the right PLM
If you want to be successful with digital transformation, you need to make sure the above strategies align with your company goals.
The right PLM will help you do this because it’s the backbone of product and data management. The benefits it offers will enable your company to meet customer requirements and become an industry leader.
Now is the time to deploy the best enterprise PLM to drive company-wide transformational changes.