In order to stay competitive, expand markets, businesses often need to reimagine their products and offerings. However, it is not always easy to bring about sweeping changes in the process, people and tools that it entails. Many things come in the way such as
a) Why fix if it ain’t broken? Organization culture sometimes is the biggest impediment
b) There are better things that we can do with the money, such as improve transactional aspects of our business or lower the cost of running it (by lets say moving business systems to the cloud)
c) What is the cost of business disruption in going over the hump?
d) Not clear on return on investment!
e) Is it CIO/CTO agenda or CFO/CEO agenda and consequently does the transformation play into the cost equation or top line equation?
f) What is the journey map?
In this post, we won’t be dwelling into a) through e) as I plan to cover these in a post dedicated to business drivers of transformation. However, once businesses have realized the importance of transforming their product creation-consumption lifecycle, there doesn’t seem to be a common, concise way of doing it. Every one sort of goes on in an exploratory path and often end up with some tactical improvements to existing processes and tools and rarely changing the people organization. I will attempt to present a journey map, in this post, to go about digital thread/twin transformation, based on my own experiences across many different industry verticals and cultures. We will break down the post in two parts
a) What are the sign posts in the journey map? You can also think of the sign posts as the maturity levels in your digital thread/twin transformation journey
b) What are the kind of activities you need to do to keep progressing in your journey? Think of these as ‘program plan’ to progress from one maturity level to the next
Lets try and find answers to the question of sign posts in the journey map, in the first part of this post. I am proposing a simplistic 5 sign post journey.
DTT Level 1: Uniform Product Definition
Across your design (electrical/mechanical CAD/software) and engineering departments, there is a clear documented way to uniquely define the product (nomenclature), linkages (BOM) and the information propagation across the organization. Uniformity of product definition allows the demand aggregation and supply functions to apply product level controls
DTT Level 2: Product Definition Change Control
In the earlier sign post, we have ensured that uniform product definition exists across the organization. In this sign post, we want to ensure that a formal process of changing the product definition exists and traceability of changes are easily established. You will often find that at this sign post, most organization have change control board (CCB) and all product definition changes are easily auditable. What changed, who changed it and why was it changed – can often be answered at this sign post
DTT Level 3: Integrated Product Processes
Once you have the ability to uniquely represent and change the product definition, the next milestone is to acquire a process driven ability to integrate various perspectives related to product (e.g. how would it be manufactured, how would it be serviced e). Every function within an organization influences the product and the product influences every function in turn. Mapping these interrelations, defining the business and technology architecture and orchestrating product processes in an integrated manner, is an important sign post in the Digital thread and twin journey. The interrelations are typically a result of how product, demand and supply interact with each other, as shown in the Venn diagram below
DTT Level 4: Product Ecosystem Integration
Connecting the product processes within the organization, is an important sign post, however modern day businesses operate as a connected ecosystem of technology partners, suppliers, contract manufacturers, communities, regulators and customers and hence there is a need for ecosystem wide integration. At this sign post, you are seamlessly collaborating with your partners, communities, regulators during the design/validation of the product. Also, sourcing collaboration, critical to the demand fulfillment process, is also achieved at this mile stone
DTT Level 5: Closed Loop Engineering
Being able to leverage the ecosystem, in bringing innovative products to the market in a repeatable process driven way is in itself an enviable milestone in Digital thread and twin journey. At this point, you have most of the systemic levers to run your product design and consumption cycles in a positive feedback loop manner. If we can successfully mesh the product definition, real world performance and state-of-the-art in technology, we would have established an organization that autonomously takes it design feedback from the individual consumer and creates/produces the products which meet the consumer needs all the time. At this milestone, you would have created the digital thread and twin that brings together the creators, consumers and society together, in a positive feedback loop!
Let me know what you think about it!