Then and Now

Back when I started selling CAD software you were happy to sell a seat or two with some training and get the customer using it. What they did with the data they created or how they managed and communicated it to other people in the business was an afterthought at best. We didn’t need to sell data management to grow the business and most of the customers couldn’t have afforded it anyway. Then around 14 years ago PTC repackaged Windchill, called it PDMLink, and gave it to us the very uneducated resellers to sell. I’m pretty sure Dave Biddle still has nightmares about some of my early Windchill deals (Gencoa and NESL Dave? 😊) which were sold on the promise of managing bills of materials (BOM’s) and managing engineering change, but just getting the CAD data management installed and adopted was an uphill struggle.

A Drawing office back in the day: The chiropractors heaven

Fast forward to the present day and thankfully we now have a crack team of PLM pre-sales consultants and I would say one of the best and most experienced implementation teams in the whole channel. I truly believe there’s nothing our colleagues at the rear of the new offices can’t take on when it comes to helping our customers implement some of the extended Windchill functionality. The opportunity to take our predominantly PDM biased Windchill customer base to one that embraces a full PLM approach to product development has never been more lucrative for both us and our customer base. But what’s the vision we need to share with them?

The World Has Changed

You have probably heard us talking about “Digital Transformation” in our LinkedIn posts and customer dialogue. It’s a broad term used to describe the strategy of adopting digital technologies to transform processes and ultimately a business model. Concurrent’s customer base are at varying levels of maturity in this area but the majority we are actively engaged with understand they need to do something in this area in order to grow and progress.

The executives in the businesses we support are under more pressure than ever to innovate faster than their competition, reduce product and process complexity, ensure quality and compliance and manage time and resources more efficiently. They can either choose to throw more people at their current, and often outdated, processes to address this or look a using the latest technology to improve efficiencies in these areas.

The Thread is Broken

As you read this the majority of our multi-seat customers have also engaged us in getting Windchill installed. In most cases this has been done in the engineering or design department to control the CAD data the team creates. The first thing I will ask you to consider is the cost our customer incurs to create the information their product development teams produce. In most businesses the engineers will be the most expensive employees outside of the management structure.

The main pieces of information that are then sent outside the engineering department into the wider business is usually then a bunch of 2D drawings and some kind of BOM structure (usually on one of the aforementioned 2D drawings or on an Excel spreadsheet) which becomes the reference for the rest of the business in how to manufacture and assemble the product.

Leonardo Da Vinci: Father of the Exploded View

The earliest recorded example of an engineering drawing was of a Babylonian castle, the fossilized remains of which were dated to 2000BC. The father of the modern engineering drawing you could argue is Leonard Da Vinci who produced very detailed drawings of his concepts and is credited as the inventor of the “exploded view”. It’s a bit crazy to think most of our customers haven’t moved on from the way we have communicated product information for over 4000 years! 

The fact is by sending the information out in these formats, usually using piles of paper or on uncontrolled emails, the value to the business of the information they spent so much time and money creating is instantly diluted. Most of the stakeholders who then get their hands on these outputs have to re-work the information to suit their own needs. Someone in purchasing for instance will want a very different view of a BOM than someone in manufacturing. This creates more non-value add time being spent by the business getting the information formatted for consumption. The re-formatted data is then usually stored in other silos around the company. It’s not unusual to find three or more disconnected views of the BOM, all at different revision states. Which one is the right one? Sadly, for some of our customers nobody is quite sure. Luckily, we can help them.

Introducing the Digital Thread

The Digital Thread isn’t a single piece of software. It’s a strategy that links all the engineering and manufacturing systems within a business together and ensures a streamlined and efficient flow of information between each. In most companies thousands (sometimes millions) has been spent on expensive systems such as PLM, ERP, MRP, MES and CRM. And that list is not exhaustive either. Bring into the mix now a lot of companies looking at IoT strategies to get the most from their products and operations and you have a lot of very expensive disconnected silos of information in place. Luckily for our customer base, and for us, PTC have some great solutions for joining all these sources together with our Windchill and Thingworx solutions.

So how do we do this? It all depends on the current maturity of the customer and where they determine they need to get to in order to reach their business goals. The size of the problem we are trying to fix will also dictate the solution and the level of investment the client will commit to. Adrian and Chris are our experts in what the solution should look like and I will not get too technical here , but essentially the first step is to get the customer to move from being “drawing centric” where the 2D drawing is the go-to source for all design and manufacturing guidance, towards “part centric” – managing and evolving the part in Windchill with the drawing, model and assembly and other documents becoming artefacts that describe the part.

Once the customer has gone part centric, making changes to a part becomes a much more efficient process. They can also then start to develop the various views of the BOM in the system and then release these in a controlled manner to the rest of the business, ultimately moving the completed BOM into their ERP or MRP system. The engineering information can then also be repurposed in other areas like manufacturing process management and operator instructions. Shop floor operatives then consume the information electronically, rather than on paper, using tools like Operations Advisor and Thingworx Navigate. Thingworx Foundation, either in its SCO (Smart Connected Operations) or SCP (Smart Connected Products) format, then brings other information from physical assets into the same thread giving the company a rich view of both their products and manufacturing assets. All of this complimented by Creo (smart connected design) and Vuforia Studio (augmented reality).

It’s an Enterprise Thing

The Digital Thread Across the Enterprise

More efficient and streamlined communication and development of engineering information throughout a business can have a positive impact in pretty much every department:

CxO/Director Level – By modernising working practices and removing non-value add activity more time is created for innovation. This can help them capture more market share, protect their current position in the market, and ultimately create more value for shareholders.

Engineering – We have all heard our customers say that the engineering teams are under constant pressure to do more with less. Closing the loop between design and production by making information more readily available to colleagues downstream creates more time for value engineering.

Sales & Marketing – Re-purposing CAD information to create interactive customer experiences using technologies like AR and photo-rendering shortens the sales cycle and creates differentiation in the market.

Manufacturing & Supply Chain – Better information flowing downstream, and data coming back from the shop floor, helps businesses to optimise the use of their assets. This in turn increases throughput and worker productivity. More accurate information reduces errors which reduces scrap and rework and ensures quality. The overall impact is significantly reduced operating costs.

Customer Operations – Better data, both from the internal processes and the product in the field allows a model of customer self-service to be adopted. The data can also be used to improve the customer experience through better product/operator instructions.

Customer Service – Analysing and refining the data from the product in the field allows companies to guarantee uptime, reduce travel costs for activities like repair or service, and resolve customer problems faster. The upside of this is greater customer satisfaction and improved customer retention.

The Future is Now

Hopefully this has given you an insight into how the conversations we are having with our customer base is changing. The recent events with Coronavirus and a lot of our customers being forced to send employees home to work will reinforce their awareness of having robust collaboration and communication platforms so it has never been a better time to start sharing our vision. PTC currently have the best-in-class solutions in this area and it’s important as a business we capture our own market share before the competition catch up.

The field sales operation is working hard with our customers to develop roadmaps for Digital Transformation. We already have one in well into progress with Roxel and are close to getting SPP Pumps and Expro onto the same path, to name but a few. We have many other conversations ongoing elsewhere and I hope to share some of the success stories in future newsletters.

So next time you’re talking to a customer about Creo or Windchill, let them know that we have a nice process we can take them through to explore how other parts of the business can benefit from a Digital approach to product development and manufacturing. Their journey will be complex, but the value for them and the business for us will be good.