Digital transformation has become a buzzword in recent years, and for good reason. Companies that embrace digital technologies are more likely to stay ahead of the curve, differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and meet the evolving needs of their customers.
The benefits of digital transformation can be far-reaching, from improved customer experience to cost savings and increased efficiency.
In this blog, we will explore the various benefits of digital transformation, and why it is essential for companies to embrace this trend in order to remain competitive in the digital age.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is a term used to describe the process of transforming an organization’s business model and operations through the use of digital technologies. It’s important because it can help you stay ahead of your competition, improve customer experience and attract new customers.
The benefits of digital transformation include:
- Improved customer experience: Digital transformation can help you better understand and meet the needs of your customers. With the use of data analytics and other digital tools, you can gather insights into customer behavior and preferences, and tailor your products and services accordingly.
- Increased efficiency and productivity: Digital transformation can automate many processes, reducing manual labor and freeing up staff to focus on higher-value tasks. This can lead to increased efficiency and productivity across your organization.
- Competitive advantage: By embracing digital technologies, you can stay ahead of your competitors and differentiate yourself in the marketplace. This can help you attract new customers and retain existing ones.
- Cost savings: Digital transformation can help you reduce costs by streamlining processes and eliminating unnecessary steps. This can lead to significant savings over time.
- Innovation: Digital transformation can open up new opportunities for innovation and growth. By embracing new technologies and ways of working, you can develop new products and services that better meet the needs of your customers.
Creating a Digital Transformation Roadmap
The first step to creating a digital transformation roadmap is to identify the scope of your transformation. What are you trying to achieve? What are the goals and objectives of your business? How will you measure success?
Once this has been determined, it’s time to set up a timeline for achieving those goals.
Once these steps have been completed, it’s time for action! You should now have a clear idea of what needs changing within your organization and how long it will take before those changes become visible.
Building a Digital Transformation Team
When you’re building your digital transformation team, it’s important to define roles and responsibilities. You’ll want to make sure that everyone understands their role in the process and what they are expected to do. For example, if someone is responsible for monitoring the performance of shop floor machines, they should know what the ideal OEE is of each machine, how they are going to collect that data, and how they are going to distribute it to enterprise decision makers.
It’s also important that you select team members who have complementary skillsets and experience levels. If one person has extensive knowledge of augmented reality while another knows nothing about it at all, this could lead to problems down the line when it comes time for them both to collaborate on projects together – and no one wants that!
Finally, creating a culture where collaboration happens naturally between team members will help ensure successful outcomes throughout your digital transformation project(s).
Adopting the Right Technology
The first step in digital transformation is choosing the right technology. You’ll want to consider:
Software: What are your current needs and how will they change over time? Will you need additional features or functionality?
Hardware: Do you have enough computing power and storage space for all of your data, or does it need to be scaled up or down depending on usage patterns at different times of day/year/etc.? Do you have sensors to track data that you need for production insight?
Tools: What tools do developers use to build applications on top of this platform (e.g., Creo vs. Solidworks)? How easy is it for them to integrate their code with existing systems like databases and messaging queues? Are there any security issues with using these tools – and if so, how can they be mitigated by using another tool instead (e.g., switching from MySQL database server software to Microsoft Azure).
Developing a Digital Transformation Strategy
The first step to developing a digital transformation strategy is to define the scope of the project. What are you trying to accomplish? What are your objectives, and how will you measure success?
These questions can help guide your organization through its transformation journey by setting realistic goals for both short-term wins and long-term gains.
Once you’ve defined what needs changing, it’s time for step two: defining how those changes will happen. This involves creating an action plan that includes timelines for each phase of implementation as well as resources required for each stage (e.g., time from IT staff).
Some companies may choose to tackle multiple projects simultaneously; others might choose only one area at a time depending on their resources available in terms of money/manpower/etcetera).
EAC Assessments help companies answer all those questions and how to get where they want to be.
Implementing the Digital Transformation Plan
Develop a timeline. The first step in implementing your digital transformation plan is to develop a timeline with milestones that will help you track progress.
Set goals and objectives for each milestone. Once you’ve established your milestones, it’s time to set goals and objectives for each one of them so that everyone involved knows exactly what needs to be done at any given time during the project.
Track progress regularly by reviewing dashboards or reports generated from data collected during testing phases of development projects (if applicable). It’s important not only for managers but also employees on lower levels within organizations who may not have access
Monitoring and Evaluating Performance
Monitoring and measuring performance is an important part of the digital transformation process. It allows you to identify areas where you are successful, and areas that need improvement.
Monitoring can be done using a variety of tools, including:
Data Analytics Dashboards (e.g., Thingworx Analytics)
Real-time Data Share (e.g., Windchill)
Digital Twin Performance (e.g., Augmented Reality)
Adapting and Adjusting the Plan
As you progress through your digital transformation, there will be changes in the market that you need to respond to.
If a competitor introduces a new product or service, or if something happens in the industry at large, it may change how you approach your own strategy.
You might also find that your goals and objectives have changed since they were first set out; perhaps there’s been an increase in customer demand for something specific that wasn’t previously considered important enough for inclusion on the list.
The best way to handle these situations is by reviewing them regularly with other members of your team – and making sure everyone has input into decisions about how best to adjust course as needed.
Communicating the Benefits of Digital Transformation
In order to communicate the benefits of digital transformation, it’s important to understand who your stakeholders are and what they want.
If you’re working in an organization with a large number of stakeholders (such as a government agency), then there may be multiple groups that need convincing. For example:
The board wants to see results from their investment in IT infrastructure. They’ll likely be interested in metrics such as ROI and cost savings.
Executives want quick wins that will help them achieve their goals, but they also need proof that this new approach will work before they can commit time and resources to implementing it throughout the organization.
Employees want something tangible they can hold onto when explaining why this change is important for them personally (and why it matters).
Conclusion
Digital transformation is a powerful tool that can help you achieve your business goals. It’s important to remember that digital transformation is not just about implementing new technologies, but also about changing how you work and think as an organization.
Digital transformation requires commitment from everyone involved in the process – from the C-suite down through every level of your organization.
To be successful, it must be an ongoing effort rather than a one-time project or initiative. You will need to continuously innovate and improve what you’re doing if you want to stay ahead of competitors who are also pursuing digital transformation strategies.
In conclusion, digital transformation is becoming increasingly essential for companies to stay competitive and meet the needs of their customers in the digital age. However, the process of digital transformation can be complex and challenging, which is why EAC assessments can be extremely helpful.
By conducting an assessment of your organization’s current digital capabilities and identifying areas for improvement, you can develop a roadmap for digital transformation that is tailored to your specific needs and goals.
EAC assessments can help you identify gaps in your digital capabilities, streamline your processes, and develop new products and services that better meet the needs of your customers. By embracing digital transformation and leveraging the expertise of EAC assessors, you can position your company for success in the digital age.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a hypothetical situation to paint the story ‘how real-time information and predictive analytics unlock value.’
To start, imagine a fully functioning assembly line with a robot, a pneumatic system, a series of conveyors, and a vision system.
Let’s pretend the supply station in the back is bringing in our raw materials. The robot is assembling those materials with precision. The resulting assemblies are then passed on to the quality station, and the vision system inspects each of those assemblies to ensure proper alignment of the parts.
This is a pretty generic operation, but it can show how unified real-time information and predictive analytics unlock value.
Now imagine yourself as a maintenance engineer, who wants to check the status of your asset pool.
Using software, such as ThingWorx Navigate by PTC for example, you launch a role-based maintenance application. All of a sudden you see a complete list of your assets with real-time performance stats and relevant alerts or notifications. You also have a complete list of all your outstanding maintenance work orders.
From here, you have the ability to drill into any of your assets, but you start with the quality station. You immediately see the key characteristics of the station. You see that speed vibration and temperature are all operating within their specified range. You could also see notifications of any warnings, malfunctions, or potential future problems.
Next, you use your device to take a look at the pneumatic system. The pneumatic system also looks fine. Both pressure and flow are operating within the specified range, and there are no outstanding maintenance tickets or work order notifications on your screen.
Now, let’s consider a situation where there was a leak in the pneumatic system. Let’s say a loose fitting was releasing pressure, a fairly common problem in pneumatic systems. Now, rather than looking fine, your device displays flow readings outside of the designated operating range. Furthermore, an alert has automatically been sent to notify you that a system has an error. The overall status indicator on your screen has now switched from green to orange – operational, but not optimal.
Your software solution’s machine learning is now predicting that this air leak, if not repaired, will result in a pneumatic gate failure in approximately 10 day’s time. The good news for you is the system has already issued you a maintenance work order to address the problem before asset failure and unplanned downtime.
This scenario is made possible by a system equipped with primary and secondary sensors, and a complete Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solution that can turn raw machine data into valuable information.
For example, your pneumatic system has an airflow sensor, as well as a pressure sensor. The conveyor systems are equipped with motor temperature sensors and vibration sensors.
You have also used your software to integrate manufacturing floor systems with real-time IT applications, asset maintenance tools, and ERP systems. This provides you with a real-time alignment of your IT and OT systems.
Now, all of your systems are throwing data out at a staggering 800 data points per second.
Your software’s machine learning then uses that real-time streaming data to establish a baseline of normal operating conditions. This way it can immediately connect and broadcast any anomalies that occur. It uses these anomalies, in conjunction with its prediction capabilities to notify you of future problems, just as in the case of the pneumatic failure.
Now that you have an understanding of what is happening under the hood, let’s take a look at how all this comes together to enable real-time operational intelligence.
On your device, you notice an orange status indicator on line one (that was created from the air leak earlier). Once that air leak has been repaired, everything returns back to normal, just as you would expect.
Let’s explore one more hypothetical situation. Consider yourself to be an operator. In this case, you have just been assigned a new order for a thousand units that need to be delivered and expedited for an end-of-day delivery.
You’re notified of the order and in this smart connected scenario you, as an operator have a single portal from which you can see and execute all of your work. Through a single pane of glass, you now have access to your business systems information and your operational data including the KPIs from your line.
On your device, you also have up-to-the-minute visibility of the OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). You see real-time data measurements of your manufacturing operation’s availability, quality, and performance.
Let’s see how some of these metrics might change if we go ahead and speed up the line to accelerate the current order, in order to make room for that expedited order.
To do that you switch the line speed from level one to level two. What you see in seconds on your device is that line speed has increased, and your assemblies are still passing the quality check.
Within a couple of minutes and a few additional cycles, on your device, you see both your performance and OEE trending upwards.
As an operator, you now are assured that you are going to meet your end-of-the-day deadline.
Using these hypothetical situations, together we have painted a picture demonstrating how you can connect disparate assets from different vendors, to provide real-time information.
You’ve also seen how you can leverage role-based applications that combine business systems information and operational data to empower your workforce with real-time actionable intelligence.
By integrating machine-learning capabilities you brought a whole new level of predictive intelligence to your factory floor, identified problems, and resolved issues with minimal impact on operational performance.
This is exactly how real-time information and predictive analytics can unlock value for your organization.
Communicating product data across an organization has become more complex than ever. Here are 9 reasons it’s time to connect your enterprise systems.
With different departments gathering product data form a variety of systems including Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and Quality Management Systems (QMS) and more, how do we know our organizations are making the most out of all the information we’re collecting?
Just think about it for a second. Our systems and departments speak different languages, while a company likely aims for a single goal. This is why it can pay to connect your systems and provide company-wide access to business and product knowledge
With an estimated 90% of the world’s data created in the last two years alone (Conner, n.d.), it’s no wonder that companies have trouble utilizing it all. The IDC estimates that just 0.5% of the data we companies produce is ever used. It’s time to change that.
1. Increased Usability
Data experts believe that if Fortune 1,000 companies increased the amount of data they used by just 10%, they could realize over $65 million in additional net income (Marr, 2015). These numbers are huge. Hopefully, they help you understand why I’m writing this blog and pleading my case.
The truth is – our systems are currently too complex for many roles within our organizations to navigate, find, and transfer the right information. This leaves our separate departments accountable for communicating different product data.
So how do we make our product data more usable? By democratizing our product data from all existing sources into one single system.
2. Better Access to Data
The most important reason your product data shouldn’t (internally) be kept a secret is because product data is your company’s most valuable asset. Not everyone who needs access to specific product information hosted in your PLM system is from your engineering department, so why force them through the same vigorous Product Lifecycle system training?
In order to effectively use data, departments must have ready access to it.
After all, the solution to this problem must make rich product information easy to accessible for a broad set of roles. By creating an organized system that connects all of your product data, your organization’s information is easily assessable to users beyond those who have created it. Just think of the possibilities if you connected your data from multiple systems and delivered it to all departments through individualized, role-based views.
3. Complete Data
Imagine an entire enterprise with access to real data, at the right time, when it’s needed. By connecting your product lifecycle management systems with your other enterprise systems, every stakeholder within your organization can leverage product data from multiple systems. They can make accurate decisions based on the latest, most accurate information from EBoM, MBoM, SBoM, ERP, MRP, and QMS data.
4. Better Insights
Better data + better visibility = better insights. Your teams are demanding more at lightning speeds from your PLM processes and solutions. This is another reason why your organization might consider integration technologies and custom front-end solutions.
An enterprise with insights into how current products and processes can be optimized can drastically improve overall productivity. Providing your team with access to up-to-date, accurate product data will allow your organization to have better insight into areas for continuous improvement.
5. Better Decisions
Ready access to information is especially important to any company involved with product development.
Users without access to information often make assumptions and resort to workarounds. This opens the door to poor decisions and errors, quality problems, and waste. Decisions made from out-of-date, inaccurate data threaten product quality and delay time to market.
By providing everyone in your organization with broad visibility into your organization will drive better, more accurate decisions. This will improve your quality, reduce waste, scrap, rework, and meeting your time-to-market goals. The analytics resulting from connected systems help users across your organization make accurate decisions throughout your entire development process.
6. Better Products
Who doesn’t want to create better products faster? Providing your organization with universal access to data will allow your company to drastically accelerate product development. How so? By connecting disparate systems, you will have access to real-time data allowing you to achieve better product decisions. Because your decisions and actions are now driven by up-to-date information, you will achieve a higher product quality.
7. Increased Productivity
Why waste time manually reading, entering and analyzing data, when it could be automatically collected, filtered, and combined? By linking enterprise systems into one simple interface, any user within your organization can access contextual, up-to-date, real-time product information anytime they need. I guarantee your productivity will grow when your organization is able to plan earlier with manufacturing, order materials sooner with purchasing all while your engineering team is spending less time pulling reports.
8. Increased Collaboration
Using a system that provides role-based access for stakeholders provides every role with the ability to quickly understand the status of a part number, inventory, and the part or assembly’s role in the “big picture.” This will not only help mobilize and inform the work of teams throughout the organization, but it will also help maximize the success of your product development. Giving your team the ability to extend and connect your PLM data into the rest of your enterprise will rapidly increase your overall organization collaboration.
9. Real Results
The ultimate benefit your organization will achieve by connecting your systems comes from your ability to get to real results faster. It makes the “to” in “Quote-to-Cash” just a little bit faster. What does that mean? Data gives your organization confidence to quickly deliver value. Good decisions, accurate manufacturing, knowledgeable service groups, self-sufficient marketing and sales teams. This all adds up to faster time to market, faster time to revenue — real results.
So.. what now? It’s time to connect your enterprise systems.
I know what you’re probably thinking, ‘this sounds great, but it’s not that easy to connect and provide role-based access to enterprise systems.’
And you’re right. It would take a tool that connects all of your enterprise systems, right? I’m glad you’ve stuck it out for the long haul because this is what I need to tell you. There IS a solution. It’s called Windchill Navigate. What is it? It is a single role-based app that you can easily access from your smartphone, tablet, or computer where you can literally see all of your product data in one place no matter what department you’re from. Mind blown? We knew we needed to get our hands on it the moment we found out this solution that everyone has been looking for. This is why PTC has trusted us to be a valued solutions provider for their product Windchill Navigate. Learn more about it in our video “Windchill Navigate: Unlocking Product Data for Everyone.”
It’s no surprise that product data is your organization’s most valuable asset. Product data gives the employees within your organization the key to their own day-to-day success. Most enterprise software tools are inaccessible to a broad range of users due to costly licensing, extensive training, and the time it takes to personalize the data for various roles throughout an organization.
Imagine how powerful your company can become with one centralized hub everyone within the organization can access without over complicating the product design process.
EAC Product Development Solutions is a Solutions Provider for PTC – which means we give companies access to the latest technologies that the Industry has to offer for product development.
What is Windchill Navigate?
PTC’s latest genius product has us all jumping up and down with joy as it is something that will ultimately make your lives easier. PTC Windchill Navigate (formerly known as PTC Navigate) is a role-based app that gives your team a platform where every department can access product information through one centralized hub. Instead of having to manually access your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or your Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system to find the information you need to share with other departments, each individual will have access right from their smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer.
The image below shows just some of the out-of-the-box apps available to PTC Navigate users. Windchill Navigate gives you the ability to customize the apps according to your company’s own organization and data needs.
Windchill Navigate offers a modern user experience that is as easy to use as a smartphone app. It’s time you started unlocking the potential of your product data.
How We Can Customize Windchill Navigate to Fit Your Organization
Our team of developers can customize and configure Windchill Navigate apps for your organization. Check out more information on managing product data and your design process with PTC Windchill Navigate.
