Digital Thread & Twin

Digital thread transformation – Journey

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,… Read More »Digital thread transformation – Journey

Digitizing Hyperscalers – Digital Data Centers

Search engines, social networks, cloud business platforms and even streaming live television, they all have one thing in common – the compute, storage & network fabric that makes them possible. The fabric, is a hyper scaled array of millions of servers & storage devices clustered in some remote location and all such clusters connected through warp speed dark fiber. If data is the oil, this fabric is the offshore drilling platform and if data is the product, this fabric is the manufacturing plant! Interestingly, manufacturing plants or the offshore drilling platforms kept evolving over the last century or so – getting faster, better, smarter over time. Automation, Interconnection and Intelligence became the hallmark of 21st century industry, and the trend aptly termed as fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. The compute fabric, we talked about in the previous section, played an important role in automation, interconnection and intelligence of the modern day industry. Now flipping the narrative on it’s head – did the industry play an important role in development of compute fabric? Cloud computing has been an enabler of Industry 4.0 however is Industry 4.0 paradigm being applied to the evolution of compute fabric to be faster, better and smarter? Is there a way to design , commission and operate hyper scaled compute infrastructure at 2X or 5X speed and run it a higher operating efficiency? Let’s examine the… Read More »Digitizing Hyperscalers – Digital Data Centers

Digital Thread & Twin – Key to subscription economy

Consumer goods, industrial products or pharmaceutical drugs – they all follow a lifecycle of creation, production, consumption and replacement by better products. The value creation at every stage of the lifecycle is vital to the evolution of not just the businesses, but also our society and the planet. All engineering disciplines focus on this value creation and generally are manifested in velocity, utility and cost associated with the stage Monetization of the value creation has traditionally been in the form of ownership transfer or throwing it over the wall. When you buy a smartphone, you pay the full price of the phone even if you use only 20% of its designed utility and eventually replace it with the new shiny toy. It has been simpler, though not most efficient, for businesses to sell you the utility through complete transfer of ownership of the product. If there was a system of engagement, that runs seamlessly from creation through consumption, it should be possible to optimize velocity, cost and utility on a continual basis. One of the easiest way to visualize this is in the way streaming video services work today – both content and presentation are continually evolving and being delivered for one subscription fee. Development of such streaming platforms and operations are interwoven in modern software lifecycle such as DevOps. Think of Digital thread and twin to be the DevOps… Read More »Digital Thread & Twin – Key to subscription economy

Is Digital Thread the New PLM?

I want us to look back and try and make sense of various process and IT interventions we have advised or participated in, for enterprises big and small, in an attempt to speedup their product innovations and (thereby and therefore) expand markets, revenue and margins. Chances are, we would have come across terms such as Product Data Management (PDM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) or more recently Digital Thread. To what degree were these (PDM, PLM ) initiatives successful in making products faster, better and cheaper has been the subject of intense debate! PDM has its humble roots in trying to manage design/engineering data and files, keeping things organized and flowing smoothly. Between new products being brought to the market and changes to the existing products, Product Data Management systems did a decent enough job of organizing various CAD Files, Part/BOM Data, Simulation/Test Data and the accountability/timeliness of the effort that resulted in such files/data. I would say, PDM was quite successful (and still is) in wanting to create a system of record of design/engineering information (i.e. data and files both), but failed to keep up with the changing market dynamic owing to Globalization of supply chains and markets Mass customization, personalization Software defined product features Internet led technology disruption – Cloud, Mobility, IOT (sometimes called ‘Digital’) Subscription economy and changing idea of product ownership Digital Thread and How is it… Read More »Is Digital Thread the New PLM?