The digital threads of design/engineering and maintenance/repair are tied together.
UPDATED 4/27/2023 with information from Siemens.
IBM and Siemens will be working together to create software that ties
maintenance/repair/overhaul (MRO) to PLM, according to a joint announcement made earlier this week.
With the partnerhsip, both companies will be selling each other’s products,
Siemens now selling Maximo (IBM’s MRO application and Rhapsody, IBM’s system
modeling application, and presumably, IBM will be selling Siemens Teamcenter. Maximo and Siemens Teamcenter are already able to exchange data
directly and plans are underway to for IBM to take a lead role in developing a
new version of system modeling language, SysML V2, using input from Siemens.
Two industry giants announcing a product collaboration, each with market-leading software, is big news indeed. Siemens has NX and Teamcenter for design, engineering and manufacturing applications for product creation, and IBM, with Maximo, has the leading applications service and maintenance product of all Siemens can create. And Siemens AG, a global industrial giant, creates a lot: trains, wind turbines, factory hardware, motors.… Connecting the two
worlds is the “cradle to grave” coverage each company sees as market expansion.
Tying the Thread
These integrations will focus on the effective reuse of processes and materials to allow traceability for sustainable product development, according to the announcement.
Also connecting design, manufacture data with the service life data is tying together a digital thread. Knowing how a product performs—or fails to perform—with detailed data could be very helpful in designing a better product more quickly. For example, a common failure of an automotive part revealed by data shared digitally from repair shops would enable an engineer to rapidly revise the part and have it replaced far quicker than how it is done now, by the processing of warranty repair records or, in the worst case, lawsuits.
“80% of your costs are often driven by decisions that are made at the beginning of the program,” says Dale Tutt, aerospace industry veteran and now head of vertical industries Strategy at Siemens. “The same would be said for sustainability or performance of products.”
In addition, information never before available at the time of design, like energy use of vehicles or buildings, could stream back to the designer, driving improvements in cost, performance and sustainability.
Not a First
But first, IBM and Siemens have a little catching up to do. Siemens is not the first of the big CAD companies to expand into
MRO. PTC has long considered MRO the “long tail’ in the life of a product,
has invested heavily in MRO and been able to land some business from it (like
this contract with the USAF). The company doubled down on its
expansion into field service (AKA MRO) with a whopping $1.46 billion acquisition of ServiceMax last year after previously acquiring Servigistics in 2012 for $220 million. These acquisitions bought not only technology but also perhaps more importantly,
MRO customers—customers who didn’t have to believe PTC could serve them with general-purpose applications like Arbortext (tech docs), Vuforia (AR) products, Creo (CAD) and Windchill (PLM).
Siemens following suit with the IBM partnership gives PTC some competition but also validates PTC’s Jim Heppelmann, who bravely sailed into uncharted waters.
Why Unite?
As two continents adrift for eons evolve different species, so have the worlds of creation (design, engineering and manufacturing), the other of ownership and maintenance, evolved different software tools. After all this time, why unite them?
Such a combination would increase operational visibility, improve serviceability, reduce commissioning, reduce repair, reduce rework (by 5-10%) increase availability of assets (downtime reduced by 15%) and generally improve customer satisfaction. Productivity is estimated to increase by 25 percent, they say.
“We see a lot of different roles within companies, within product development across systems with mechanical engineers, software, electrical … and then you get into manufacturing, then field maintenance, and so many applications,” says Tutt. “There’s a lot of information created and kept in silos. We need to have seamless connectivity as we go through the entire product lifecycle.
“Once you get in the field, how do you operate it in a more effective way? Our customers look at energy usage and carbon across the entire lifecycle. Eighty, ninety percent of this happens during operations and maintenance. This is why it’s so important to be able to provide a holistic solution, so we’re accounting for all the energy usage and waste.”
The presenters weave together applications from their companies that will, as a result of this
MRO collaboration, now happily share data. In addition to the applications mentioned before, IBM is supplying product and software requirements, systems engineering and verification (Rhapsody), while Siemens Capital is providing software for function design, logical and physical architecture, multi-board system design and system logic. There are so many applications intertwined that there seems to be more in the making than just a joint enterprise asset management application.
“We are going to have a stronger connection of our development tools with Rhapsody,” confirms Tutt.
About IBM
IBM Maximo is the leading enterprise-level asset management suite of software applications. It competes with other SLM applications, also known as enterprise asset management (EAM) applications, like IFS Cloud and UpKeep, Oracle E-Business Suite, HxGN EAM (formerly Infor EAM and now owned by Hexagon) and ERP applications (like SAP’s EAM).
The global enterprise asset management market was estimated to be $4.2 billion in 2022 by Forrester Research. The 3D CAD software market, by comparison, is estimated to be about $10 billion by ResearchAndMarkets.com.
Asset management applications are used in energy (oil and gas, wind and solar installations, public utilities), manfucturing (factories and production facilities), transportation (aircraft fleets and airports, truck fleets, subway systems).
Despite IBM’s prominence in the management of systems in the field, it hasn’t played in the field of design and engineering for a generation. The only products in IBM’s portfolio now applicable to design engineers are Rhapsody, the company’s model-based system engineering (MBSE) application and software design and verification applications. It will surprise the current generation of engineers that IBM played a pivotal part in CAD history. In the early days starting in 1978, IBM sold CADAM, a 3D CAD program developed by Lockheed. CADAM ran on IBM hardware and used IBM terminals. IBM made its own CAD programs (Fastdraft and CADWrite), but they were not successful. Neither was IBM’s CAD-specific PC—the RT. All through the 1980s, IBM was selling CADAM, SDRC’s I-DEAS and CATIA, making IBM a major player in the CAD market. But in the 1990s, the company began to retreat from CAD. By 1991, IBM sold its stake in CATIA and stopped selling it.
Returning to CAD but with a partner like it is doing with Siemens could be an exploratory expedition for IBM. The company that once ruled the world of computing with mainframes, created the first PC for business (the IBM PC), started the revolution in computing that led to a computer at every desk, and spawned a bigger business in software (Microsoft) was also to bow out of the PC market, unable to keep up with companies like Dell. Its last computer was the ThinkPad, which was sold to Lenovo. IBM led in big computers, once unassailable with mainframes, got occasional notice within the computing industry (notably Deep Blue), but it’s usually other companies that make headlines with supercomputers now. IBM hopes to make a comeback with quantum computing, in which it leads all others, according to Time magazine.
