A report on CIMdata & PDT Road Map Europe 2024 event in Gothenburg.
Every well-run technical conference advances in content over its predecessors, as demonstrated by the CIMdata PLM Road Map / Eurostep presentations recently given in Gothenburg, Sweden. Fading away were prior years’ discussions of the ins and outs of product lifecycle management (PLM) and solution providers.
Instead, speakers focused on how digital transformations impact their organizations and how the disruptions are managed. At prior conferences, these approaches usually got little attention.
Taken together, the presentations addressed the learning curves of digital transformations in power generation, pharmaceuticals, nuclear reactors, and wholesale grocery distribution. And they showed the breadth and depth of digital transformation’s penetration into the global economy.
The Gothenburg conference was titled “Value Drivers for Digitalization of the Product Lifecycle: Insights for the PLM Professional.” As an introduction, a high-level overview of the conference showed that digitalization can be shown to boost revenues and growth and extend manufacturing capabilities while tightening control over information for use and re-use over decades; two AI consortiums were also described.
One presentation that resonated with many attendees was from Mr. Peter Vind, enterprise architect, Siemens Energy, who focused on Business Capability Models (BCMs) as a way to prepare for changes (“both big and small, good or bad”) and to enhance the Siemens Power business model, Power as a Service (PaaS). Mr. Vind explained that BCMs define what the company needs to do to achieve its business strategy goals; the BCM serves as a bridge between business needs and IT and structures capabilities into logical clusters and lays the groundwork for enterprise transformation.
Built on elements of PLM’s digital threads and aspects of digital models, Siemens Energy’s BCMs manage the lifecycle from inception through engineering, design, manufacture, service, and disposal, Mr. Vind said. This forms an information backbone that provides consistent, accurate, and up-to-date information and manages design and engineering changes.
Mr. Anders Romare, chief digital and information officer at Denmark-based Novo Nordisk, focused on how this pharmaceutical giant uses digital transformation to shorten the drug discovery process by several years. He stressed that Novo Nordisk is focused on reaching more patients, manufacturing capacity, and engines of sustainable growth.
Elements include:
• LabDroid robotics, which uses model-driven advanced analytics and connected technology to make research projects smarter and faster.
• DataCore, an “ecosystem of source systems,” a new shared-data foundation that is scalable, secure, and supported by data governance.
• NovoScribe to automatically generate structured clinical-development documents: it is already 70% faster than previous methods.
• Quantum computing, the focus of a US$200 million Novo Nordisk Foundation investment, to leverage Gefion, Denmark’s first AI supercomputer, with a community of users.
The opportunities and challenges of AI and automation—the Digital Core—were spelled out by Mr. Gary Langridge, engineering manager / digital thread in the Ocado Technology unit of the UK-based Ocado Group, an online retail and wholesale grocer and technology provider.
Ocado is shaping the future of e-commerce and logistics, but Mr. Langridge said there are many challenges to ensuring that customers get safe, fresh foods delivered on time. Ocado sees this as a great value compared with conventional grocery operations.
He said over 10,000 “fulfillment” robots are used in Ocado’s Hives (distribution centers), each of which can pick a 50-item order in under five minutes. He added that Ocado Hives can handle hundreds of orders simultaneously. Ocado’s robots can handle a diversity of packages, including fragile items, a variety of weights, shapes, and sizes, and they pack densely and quickly, he noted.
The system currently handles 50% of Ocado’s range of goods (out of about 100,000 SKUs) and will reach 70% by 2026, Mr. Langridge added. An AI-based “air traffic control” system with proprietary wireless technology orchestrates the Hives; Ocado’s robots are not autonomous.
Ocado’s Digital Core deployed PLM tightly integrated with organizational change management, system governance, and foundational processes. “The digital thread handles the horizontal integration of data,” Mr. Langridge said, “but we’re still working on vertical integration” and “finding the right partners for cultural fits.”
CIMdata’s Aerospace & Defense PLM Action Group (AD PAG) shared its research-based insights on Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and its reality and promise. Presenters were Mr. James Roche, AD PAGpractice director of the CIMdata-administered PLM advocacy group, and Mr. Sandeepak Natu, co-director of CIMdata’s simulation-driven systems development (SDSD) practice.
They noted that MBSE is gaining traction in A&D due to increasing product complexity, the growing role of software in products, and the U.S. Department of Defense’s digital engineering strategy; hence, investment in MBSE is expected to continue growing.
The presentation pointed out that MBSE is found mainly in conceptual design and development, such as requirements definition and allocation, system architecture definition, and design verification and validation. It is expected to expand into production, utilization, and support with the growth of technologies like IoT/IIoT and digital twins. MBSE is also expected to move into software design, product line engineering, and design for safety and security.
In A&D, MBSE is still in the early adoption phase, and maturity levels vary significantly. Successful MBSE adoption requires a well-defined vision and strategy, strong executive commitment, appropriate methodologies, the development of MBSE expertise, education and training initiatives, middle management support, and robust tool integration and standardization. The biggest challenges of MBSE implementation are its organizational impact and cultural resistance.
TheAD PAG survey found a crucial need for enhanced interoperability between tools and platforms, open application program interfaces (APIs), and adherence to standards. Respondents also said they wanted enhanced user interfaces, more capable change management, and stronger tools for change impact analysis. The survey also revealed that MBSE investment justifications are shifting from immediate returns toward long-term strategic value considerations.
The push for high-speed innovation is delayed by speed bumps such as changes in requirements, supply chain bottlenecks, and ever-increasing product complexity. Dr. Uyiosa Abusomwan, senior global technology manager for digital engineering and conference keynoter for Day Two, outlined how Eaton Corporation navigates these market dynamics with a novel approach to product development.
Dr. Abusomwan outlined Eaton’s “aPriori Deployments” within its infrastructure of connected engineering tools.
This infrastructure relies heavily on:
Model-Based Engineering (MBE) to analyze deformation, critical stresses, and fatigue; thermal impacts; engineering calculations and design rules; and insights into costs, manufacturing, and sustainability.
Intelligent Automated Design for material selection, design calculations, and rules; structural and fatigue analyses; cost and lead-time considerations; and AI-enabled optimization with parameterized models, process automation, and reduced-order modeling.
Furthermore, Dr. Abusomwan presented the impacts of aPriori Deployments on three Eaton product lines:
• A 4-fold performance gain and 80% weight reduction in intelligent high-efficiency, light-weight heat exchangers.
• Using AI and multi-physics parametric optimization, an 87% reduction in the automated design time for lighting fixtures.
• A 65% reduction in autonomous digital design time for high-speed gears used in electric vehicles.
The challenges of operating enterprise-scale PLM implementations were addressed by Mr. Jorgen Dahl, senior director of PLM at GE Aerospace. He covered ensuring that the existing system works to its full capability and is stable and usable by all who need it. And this is amid continual modernization to accommodate nonstop business transformation, Mr. Dahl said, delivering new digital thread capabilities across the enterprise and accommodating innovations such as virtualized infrastructure automation.
Mr. Dahl urged his peers to set “uncomfortably ambitious” goals of 75% to 99.9% improvement. “It’s not enough to define the strategy and share it,” he observed. The strategy “has to be shared early and often because the minute after you are done sharing it, understanding of it may start to deteriorate and get reinterpreted.” At the heart of his presentation were four things to do and corresponding “do-nots:”
• Imagine the ideal end state and do NOT set goals based on current constraints.
• Ask “what must be true” and do NOT proceed without clarity.
• Create a multi-phased development strategy and do NOT use return on
investment (ROI) calculations to drive short-term goals; as a substitute for a
holistic strategy, an ROI focus could make things worse, not better.
• Every new capability must lead to the end goal rather than developing short-
term improvements with no clear path forward.
“This may appear like common knowledge to many,” Mr. Dahl cautioned, “but over 30 years of observation suggests it is not.”
Dr. Rob Bodington, Eurostep technical fellow speaking about ShareAspace, outlined how defense contractors can be sure of the contents of their Digital Twins and Digital Threads. To outline the use of commercial frameworks for intellectual property—again over today’s long-lived and highly complex weapons platforms and systems—he used an acronym, SMART.
Dr. Bodington defined SMART as unambiguous Semantics in requesting information, Measurable and enforceable data key performance indicators (KPIs) in contracts, Accuracy and precision in specifying what is asked for, Reasoned requests for only what is necessary, and being Timely about when data is needed. Added to these requests, he noted, is compliance with security regulations, maintaining trust, respecting commercial constraints, and developing sound ontologies.
There are “way too many” standards, he said, with many overlaps. And while standards reflect the collective experience of an industry, he pointed out, they sometimes address “problems you didn’t know you had.”
AI “will help,” Dr. Bodington continued, by generating and exploiting ontologies while classifying data and exploiting its contexts. AI can also generate and clarify terminology in contracts.
Dr. Erik Herzog, Technical Fellow at Saab Aeronautics, provided an update on the Heliple-2 project to create federated PLM capabilities that are interoperable and a feasible alternative to monolithic PLM systems. Heliple-2, he explained, uses the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standard, its related Genesis architecture, and the STEP standards.
Heliple-2 addresses a core information challenge in the 50-year lifecycles of weapons systems—their development systems are commonly replaced three times, Dr. Herzog pointed out.
Working on the Heliple-2 project are Eurostep, Saab, Volvo, IBM, LynxWork (a startup using OSLC for integration and traceability in engineering software), Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova, and KTH, Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology and its largest technical university.
Using LynxWork and OSLC, plug-and-play integration can be implemented in a week, he said. The next steps for the program are industry-scale validation, backward navigation for links under configuration management, and demonstrating analysis capabilities spanning multiple applications, Dr. Herzog concluded.
Dr. Cristina Paniagua, a Luleå University of Technology researcher, addressed shortcomings in commonly used tools and solutions. She spelled out how the Swedish-Finnish Arrowhead flexible Production Value Network (fPVN) initiative is integrating traditional standards with emerging technologies in PLM, ERP, data management, and interoperability. This initiative has goals similar to Heliple-2.
Continuous evolution and integration are essential, she concluded.
Image: A conceptual view of the Arrowhead fPVN project as discussed by Dr. Cristina Paniagua. Note the centrality of CIMdata’s lifecycle optimization hexagon. Image courtesy of TacIT
Interestingly, most of the presenters in Gothenburg delved into how their organizations are improving the management of product data and information. Many zeroed in on using PLM in digital transformation and how PLM is increasingly recognized as essential to overcoming data complexities and frustrations.
In my opening remarks, I reiterated that successful digital transformation requires a holistic, end-to-end approach to connectivity, strategies, and tactics that must address the organization’s issues with its people, processes, and the technologies it uses. I also stressed the criticality of organizational change management in maximizing value delivery. And I covered recent developments in PLM itself, such as AI, that enhance the value that can be realized from investment in digitalization, anticipating customer demands as they evolve, and market opportunities—all these motivate investing in digitalization of the product lifecycle.
Final thoughts on PLM value
As PLM professionals, we must continually seek to enhance the value resulting from the digitalization of the product lifecycle. This requires keeping an eye on the evolving trends and enablers of digital transformation, which are comprehensively laid out in CIMdata’s Critical Dozen.
In Gothenburg, it was repeatedly emphasized that maximum value can only be obtained from a holistic, end-to-end approach and that organizational change management plays a critical role in maximizing the adoption of digitalization and delivering the expected value. Ultimately, investment in the digitalization of the product lifecycle is motivated by evolving customer demands and newly uncovered market opportunities.
