IT/OT convergence provides up-to-date data from throughout the product and production lifecycle, allowing engineers to make decisions with greater confidence.
Siemens has submitted this article. Written by Magnus Edholm, Head of Marketing for the Digital Enterprise, Siemens Digital Industries.
In today’s industrial landscape, companies of all sizes and from all markets are learning to operate in an era characterized by rapid innovation and ceaseless improvement. Buyers in consumer and commercial markets demand products that not only have cutting-edge capabilities, but also are sustainable, which is making products more complex than ever and sparking intense competition amongst businesses. To meet the unrelenting pace of progress, ever-evolving customer needs and environmental goals, companies have to do more than weave sustainability, agility and intelligence into their products. They must weave it into the very fabric of their organizational DNA.
In the past, sustainability was often treated as a bolt-on; however, that is no longer the case. It has grown into a primary concern for companies around the world as business strategies and new regulations align to drive profitable sustainability initiatives that reduce the environmental impact across all industries. These trends have implications across the product and production lifecycle, and will drive changes in how companies design, test, manufacture, source and recycle the products of the future.
Our industrial activities have certainly contributed to the ongoing climate crisis. At the same time, the technological innovation being fostered in industry will also help create impactful solutions to help reduce carbon emissions, lower our resource usage and safeguard the future of our planet.

To realize this impact and overcome the challenges of tomorrow, companies need technology and engineering partners that can provide integrated software, automation and services to facilitate the creation of a digital transformation strategy. Digital transformation enables companies to combine the real and digital worlds, managing their businesses through both the real and virtual worlds.
This combining of real and digital unlocks a critical resource: data. Bringing these two worlds together enables the flow of data between all stakeholders involved in the development of a product or the production itself. Digitalization in this manner can also guide and support companies on their sustainability journeys, facilitating energy and resource efficiency, decarbonization and the creation of a circular economy. In sum, it enables companies to achieve more while using fewer resources.
As we move into the future, the ways in which data is generated, captured and deployed will mean the difference between pulling ahead of the competition or being left behind. Those companies that can unlock their vast data resources will accelerate their transformation into digital enterprises and be positioned to quickly adapt to changing customer needs and market dynamics from product design to manufacturing to recycling and beyond.
Unlocking data within the organization
The digital journey starts by combining the real and digital worlds across the lifecycle for both product and production—design, realize and optimize, including recycling at the product life end. The result is new flows of data between all the key areas for product and production, including engineering models, test results, materials, building processes, automation code and more.

These can be considered as “horizontal” flows of data that move from product development to production, between engineering domains and across functional groups. By enabling horizontal flows of data, companies can supercharge optimizing processes throughout the organization.
Horizontal flows of data enable clearer and faster communication between teams, supporting more effective and frequent collaboration, especially across engineering domains that have traditionally operated in silos. By working together, these teams can better overcome the complexity of modern products and production systems. And with the digital twin, engineers can also run multitudes of design iterations in quick succession to find optimal solutions in both product design and production planning. Now they can accelerate design cycles while reducing cross-domain integration issues.
But what about the other direction? What can vertical flows of data do for companies as they confront the challenges of tomorrow? In short, they can do quite a lot. We summarize the vertical movement of data with the phrase “IT/OT convergence.” At the highest level, such data flows connect executives, managers and planners in the top floor directly with the day-to-day operations on the shop floor throughout the organization.

The convergence of information and operational technology (IT/OT) in recent years has been a catalyst for companies to build top floor to shop floor flows of data. IT/OT convergence enables companies to connect information and operations, increasing transparency and access to data across the product and production lifecycle and throughout the supply ecosystem. This increased connection provides several benefits, including:
- Data-driven supply chain management: With real-time updates from its supplier network, manufacturers can create a more resilient and streamlined production chain to proactively adjust operations and material sourcing to adapt to unplanned changes in demand.
- Predictive maintenance: Time is incredibly valuable in factories. With access and analysis to real-time operational data, predictive maintenance is now possible. Workers can schedule and conduct maintenance when required, greatly reducing downtime and costs.
- Holistic approach to sustainability: With IT/OT convergence, companies can quickly achieve energy transparency, track power usage, water and even supplier data to determine the CO2 footprint of the entire value chain.
- Maximizing collaboration: Integrating IT and software capabilities into traditional automation fosters a creative co-creation between OT and IT departments—effectively enlarging the manufacturing workforce without increasing headcount.
- Faster ideation and innovation: By understanding the manufacturing process as a whole and considering all available data, OT can have a comprehensive approach to optimization. Through technologies like virtual PLCs, integration with digital twins and leveraging vast OT data, the quick, low-risk innovation of IT can be brought into the factory—all while maintaining robustness and reliability.
Digital threads are extending further and further into supply chains and ecosystems, extending the reach of vertical data flows beyond the borders of a company’s own enterprise. Decision makers will have access to the most up-to-date logistics information on material delivery, production timelines and even potential supply disruptions. The result of this data and access is vastly improved confidence in conclusions made as they are based on detailed and contemporaneous information.
Becoming a digital enterprise with access to data will also help drive sustainability. Data is the key to creating more sustainable designs, improving energy consumption, becoming more energy efficient in the factory, driving decarbonization and building the circular economies of the future. Rich data will give us greater insights on how to reuse resources, optimize the movement of materials and products, build sustainable supply chains and more. In fact, recent analysis has found that 80 percent of a product’s sustainability performance is determined during the design stage and the decisions made therein.

Accelerate your transformation by leveraging data
Through digital transformation, companies can take full advantage of their most precious resource—data. The result is greater transparency, traceability and the ability to create a closed loop between product development, production and optimization. It is how industrial companies can become more resilient to future disruptions while achieving greater agility in their processes to drive efficiency and flexibility. The result will be more innovative and sustainable products that will delight customers.
This transformation must happen faster and faster for companies to keep up with the pace of innovation and the competition. For that, they can partner with us and our Siemens Xcelerator business platform.
Essentially, Siemens Xcelerator grants access to hardware, software, vast knowhow and established partner systems. Working together, companies can connect the data that is already within the organization, leading to a more holistic understanding of operations across the product and production lifecycle, and from top floor to shop floor. As a result, they can become a digital enterprise faster than ever with Siemens Xcelerator.
To learn more, visit www.siemens.com/digital-enterprise.
About the Author

Magnus Edholm is the Head of Marketing for the Digital Enterprise at Siemens Digital Industries.
Prior to starting his career at Siemens in 2007, he was technical product manager at the company UGS with a focus on visualization and digital manufacturing. During more than 23 years in the PLM business he has been working in various industries across the globe in pre-sales, post-sales and marketing roles. Magnus studied integrated product development engineering at the University of Skövde in Sweden.
The Digital Enterprise enables manufacturing companies to streamline and digitalize their entire business process, seamlessly integrating suppliers into the mix. A company’s digitalization journey can begin at any point in a value chain and can be extended gradually depending on needs and requirements.