You might have heard the song, or perhaps just know the title, Break On Through (To the Other Side), performed by The Doors in the late 60’s with lyrics by the late Jim Morrison. The song’s title and lyrics reminded me that we’re living in times of great change and disruption and that breaking through barriers that have been constructed to keep us from greater knowledge is a problem we see in many organizations. Today, all companies are attempting to transform from their growingly chaotic past to breaking through to the other side—one in which they can keep pace and continuously adapt with greater agility.
Every company is being impacted by ubiquitous change—the need to adapt due to new market realities and disruptions, the need to innovate with speed and keep pace with the confluence of emerging technologies, and the need to transform their products as well as their businesses models to provide the value that their future customers will demand.
Change is Accelerating
The major trend we must face in an uncertain world, is that change is only going to accelerate. You cannot run—you cannot hide. The fact is that changes in technology are occurring beyond our ability to anticipate them. We often overlook this fact, assuming that what we’ll buy today will meet our needs tomorrow. When it comes to PLM systems, this has clearly proven not to be true. And it’s not just technology and connectivity, but the many different types of data now used in our products (i.e., model-based system engineering (MBSE), simulations, software, electronics, electro-mechanical, etc.), which need to be viewed and collaborated on by more diverse and distributed groups, enabling us to share more knowledge and innovate at continually accelerating rates.
Adapting to New Market Realities
There is one major differentiator between companies that succeed in the long term and those that get disrupted—business resiliency. If you’re digitally transforming or working on a large digitalization effort, the one question you should be asking yourself is, how can we cultivate greater business resiliency? The ability to adapt during uncertain times, such as the pandemic, is what separates those that thrive from those that get disrupted.
Confluence of Emerging Technologies
The pace at which technologies are emerging and compounding on one another has caused a shift in how companies think about technology. You can no longer allow specific domains to budget and acquire best-of-breed technologies, hoping that your IT group can keep them integrated with other similarly acquired “one-off” procurements, and then magically expect a digital thread to bridge this myriad of one-off procurements with no thought as to how these isolated technologies will result in a traceable digital thread.
Many companies have already weighed themselves down with a tremendous amount of technical debt maintaining these isolated, and often obsolete, technologies when what they need to do is strategically use technology that enables their enterprise to share and collaborate across domains.
The spend on technology must use the ability to leverage technology (typically a platform at the core) to improve operational efficiency, enhance customer engagement and, most importantly, enable collaboration. Ultimately, this will result in a more adaptive organization that is more innovative in terms of the products it produces while also encouraging new business models (i.e., digital thread, digital twin, etc.).
You can no longer afford to get stuck on obsolete PLM software—typically a portfolio of products built on different technology stacks. These are mine fields for digital transformation initiatives. The backbone of your product ecosystem should be a platform with an inherent digital thread that can be customized and upgraded as quickly as possible, with the ability to build applications and connect to other applications, giving you the openness, flexibility, and scalability to allow your company to take advantage of emerging technologies and adapt quickly as required, without being dependent on the software vendor for some future capability you couldn’t have foreseen months before. The fact is, you absolutely cannot continue to endure long and expensive upgrades. For more on the impact of PLM upgrades the different PLM vendors, see the CIMdata Upgrade Study.
Going beyond the boundaries of traditional PLM, Aras provides a platform that enables organizations to configure and customize any application built on it. Aras provides all Aras PLM applications as part of the subscription. Aras’ customers can also build applications on top of the platform to fill any gaps, as required, and can connect them to other applications, so you’re never dependent solely on the software vendor. The platform enables companies to extend the digital thread across the enterprise, giving customers bi-directional traceability and the ability to share data securely, in context, with more users and a much higher percentage of users not in engineering. All of this, upgraded by Aras as part of the subscription and guaranteed, which is unique in the industry. The reason Aras can do this is because of the architecture and the low-code data modeling of the Aras platform.
Transformation of Products and Business Models
You can no longer engineer a product and organize and operate a company the way you did twenty years ago and provide the experience customers will value. Today, you must deliver differentiation in ways that your competitors can’t provide. This has caused many businesses to actually question what business they’re in. The market is littered with “Blockbusters” waiting to happen. Take the automotive industry as an example. Let’s say a company makes parts for engines, once a thriving business, but electronic vehicles don’t even use internal combustion engines.
Or take a look at ridesharing. Recent ridesharing market analysis illustrates the market is expected to increase by a 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between late 2019 and 2025. At this rate, the market will increase from $61 billion to $220 billion in those 5½ years—an increase of nearly 400%. These stats reveal the projected success of established ride-sharing companies globally as well as the financial potential of upcoming startup companies. As an example, Uber and Lyft are responsible for up to 14% of vehicle miles traveled in some more populated US states.
If we look more closely at products, we see a huge shift in mechanical functions becoming software functions. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this shift, Toyota Motor Corp. will increase its software engineer intake to around 40% to 50% of all technical hires in spring 2022 as it looks to supercharge the development of autonomous and other next-generation vehicles.
The even bigger issue is the need for many more disciplines to collaborate across other disciplines that use domain specific data sets in order to coordinate and optimize more complex designs.
Additionally, to handle the increased complexity of products throughout the lifecycle, companies are using cross discipline configuration management and variant management in combination with building their products based on platforms. This is very similar to how Aras’ platform architecture works—enabling greater personalization, reducing time-to-market and providing the ability to upgrade more efficiently.
Today's consumer is accustomed to paying for services they use and, in many industries, companies are shifting to “product-as-a-service” and “power by the hour” subscription models, while others are offering more personalization in their configure-to-order and engineered-to-order offerings. As a result, companies are designing new platform-based product designs to enable more sustainable personalization. Again, not all that different from what Aras offers. We no longer manufacture, ship and forget. If we want to keep the customer, it is necessary for engineering, manufacturing, operations, and maintenance work more closely together.
This is causing more companies to deploy configured digital twins, exact replicas of the physical asset in the field, not just to improve their margins in operations, service, and maintenance, but also to gain useful insights to enable them to deliver more innovative upgrades and new offerings. The ability to use this data to provide more value and a better experience to your customer is paramount.
But, a digital twin is an orphan without a digital thread that connects data, teams and, applications across the product lifecycle. This enables more people to share knowledge, gained in the later stages of the product lifecycle, with designers for better product enhancements and next generation offerings.
The digital thread can also enable a multitude of smaller closed loops, connecting internal organizations more closely and with greater impact. The digital thread, inherent in the Aras platform bridges many gaps, allowing organizations to “break on through to the other side” where they can provide a continually improving customer experience.
The pandemic forced almost every company to quickly move to remote work and, in many cases, highlighted their lack of digital readiness, whether that be security, supply chains, digital twins, digital threads, moving to a platform in the cloud, etc. It has brought about a change in mindset—moving from cost reduction as a primary driver of digital transformation, to focusing on investing in platforms and digital transformations to gain a competitive advantage with a greater degree of business resiliency. Clearly, the ability to adapt to the unknown and to do so as change accelerates significantly impacts how we work and live.
If you’re considering a way to differentiate yourselves from your competitors, please check out www.Aras.com.