By Bruce Jenkins, President, Ora Research

Siemens PLM Software will appoint Tony Hemmelgarn president and CEO effective October 1. Hemmelgarn is currently the company’s executive vice president for global sales, marketing and services. Current president and CEO Chuck Grindstaff will become executive chairman of Siemens PLM.

Hemmelgarn, a seasoned industry executive, joined the company that would become Siemens PLM when Unigraphics Solutions merged with SDRC in 2001. He was SDRC’s Ford global account vice president at the time, and had been with SDRC since 1998. Previously he held both technical and sales/marketing executive positions with Intergraph.

Grindstaff joined the company in 1978 when it was known as Unigraphics Solutions, holding a variety of R&D positions during his first decade there. He then left the company to serve as president and CEO of Waveframe Corporation, which developed and manufactured digital signal processing systems for high-end motion picture applications. There he won a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Motion Picture Academy of the Arts and Sciences for the company’s groundbreaking work and its long-term impact on the industry.

On returning to Unigraphics in 1994, Grindstaff took over leadership of the Unigraphics product business unit before assuming a broader role as vice president of Unigraphics products and operations in 2000. In 2001, Unigraphics merged with SDRC to form the PLM business later known as UGS, which Siemens acquired and rebranded as Siemens PLM Software in 2007. In 2010 Grindstaff was appointed president, and also retained his position as chief technology officer for the organization. In 2011 he assumed the role of CEO.

Now, freed from day-to-day operational duties, Grindstaff can devote even greater focus than before to the development, realization and advancement of Siemens PLM’s vision for what it calls “digitalization”—the centerpiece of the company’s strategy and value proposition launched under Grindstaff’s leadership.

“Manufacturers must weave a digital thread through ideation, realization and utilization,” the company explains. “It’s not enough to digitize. That just mimics processes digitally for incremental improvement. You have to digitalize. Digitalization makes the digital thread of knowledge a proactive agent in driving your business. With a fully optimized ‘Digital Enterprise,’ you are better equipped to initiate or respond to disruptive innovation.”

To help its customers “activate digitalization,” Siemens PLM is building what it terms a “Smart Innovation Portfolio.” This portfolio, the company says, delivers “engaged users who receive the right information at the right time—by transforming information so that only what’s relevant is delivered in a context suited to each person’s role; intelligent models that evolve throughout the process with the information necessary to optimize themselves for how they need to be built and how they should perform; realized products that achieve business goals through the integration of virtual product definition and real production execution; and an adaptive system that helps you efficiently deploy solutions today, while maintaining future flexibility.”

At the same time, Grindstaff will doubtless remain deeply engaged with the company’s customers, always one of his hallmarks as an executive, immersing himself in understanding their needs and helping foster their success through Siemens PLM solutions.

Ora Research
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