The Siemens exec shares his advice on digital transformation and the technologies, like low-code and cloud, that boost it.
The Stanley Cup wasn’t the only thing that came to Las Vegas in June. So did Siemens for its Realize LIVE Americas 2023 user conference, a congregation of engineers, innovators and software developers swapping notes on how to succeed in this quickly-changing digital age.
Digital transformation was the phrase on everybody’s lips. It was axiomatic among the conference-goers and presenters that the status quo is no longer an option, that standing still is the same as lying down. The lingering question was where and how to start moving. Thankfully, there was plenty of advice on offer.
We sat down with Dale Tutt, vice president of industry strategy for Siemens Digital Industries Software, for his perspective on some of the most crucial technologies for digital transformation and his advice for companies undergoing their own.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Engineering.com: How significant is the concept of low-code/no-code to digital transformation?
Dale Tutt: I would say it’s not a required element for digital transformation, but it increases the functionality and value.
If you think about what digital transformation means for a company, most companies start off by digitizing data, then they might start connecting it. They get value out of that. But then as you go beyond those initial steps, you want to really get to the point where you’re using generative solutions, where you’re able to look at tens of thousands of scenarios or options. And then eventually you want to use the digital twin to optimize. So you’re automating workflows throughout the process and getting more and more functionality.
So where low-code/no-code can really start to help out is to further extend your digital transformation in that it gives you more personalized, configurable solutions, as opposed to having to go in and spend a lot of time writing code. And it brings it out to more people than if you’re hard coding everything in. We used to send stuff off to the IT department who could take time to do the work, while Mendix [a low-code application development platform offered by Siemens] is pretty easy. If your engineers know how to use Mendix, they have access to Teamcenter data and they can start to do that themselves.
I always think of low-code/no-code as an extension. The core digital transformation can happen without it, but if you really want to start to get more value, you can use Mendix to write these applications or extensions, and in my opinion it adds value to the organizations using it.
Related: Low-code/No-code at Rolls-Royce: Empowering All Employees to Deliver Digital Transformation
Can you elaborate on the value of low-code/no-code?
A lot of companies have many different systems, and the minute you start pulling data out of that system and aggregating it somewhere else, and making modifications to it, it’s now no longer connected to where it came from. So a lot of our customers, when they extract data from a database and then put in an Excel spreadsheet and make changes to it, they find the data has changed in the background and they didn’t realize it. So now that what they’re presenting is out of date. It’s hard to keep that up to date.
Low-code/no-code makes it simple to access data that’s in that database and present it to a user. The user can do calculations on it, can modify the data without changing the data that’s in the database. You always have live data. Not only are they taking from Teamcenter, but they’re also taking it from SAP or maybe from Google Maps or from other systems. There are all these built-in connectors so you can aggregate that data, you can manipulate it, and you can turn it into insightful information.
Why does that have business value? Well, first off, it makes the data more accessible and usable by the people that need it the most. Second piece is, because it connects into the rest of the systems, you don’t have to go in and customize Teamcenter or X or Y, you’re now able to configure it with the Mendix app. It’s like a layer on top of the other systems. So customers get more usable data, they get it super fast, and it’s always live. So if something changes in the background, you have insight into that. You’re not taking it out of the system and manipulating it in Excel or whatever else. Some of our customers are really starting to see the value of that, being able to take their data and turn it in useful information.
Related: Engineers are World Leaders in Misusing Excel
Is the cloud a fundamental pillar of digital transformation?
Three or four years ago, I probably would have said no. There are still companies that, for whatever business objective they’re trying to satisfy, they’re going to need to remain on-premises. But I think if you’re going to really get the full benefit out of digital transformation, the cloud is becoming more and more of a necessary element. Not required, but highly recommended.
That’s because it enables you to manage your IT systems with less cost. If you think about what SaaS [Software-as-a-Service] really means, when you have everything that’s cloud-enabled, you have access to more cloud computing, but you want the interoperability of the applications. So Microsoft Office on your laptop is always being updated in the background. It used to be you had to upgrade from Microsoft Word 2010 to 2013. Then when you did, you couldn’t read 2013 documents in the 2010 version, and so it was very painful for customers. Nowadays this is updating constantly in the background.
Imagine that you get to the same place with NX or with Teamcenter. Now you’re up to date on the latest and greatest software without going through massive data updates, data migration. We started down this path—this was before we started going on the cloud—but with NX, we switched over to continuous release. And the whole thought process behind that is customers now always have access to the latest software. But the secondary benefit they’ve gotten is it puts on us an additional burden, because the software has to work without being tested in the customer’s environment. And when we went down that path, we started having a lot less problem reports coming from the field for NX.
I think that same value statement that you see with NX continuous release, you’re going to be able to see with SaaS solutions in the long run. I do think it’s the way to go. I think about the business value. The customers always have the latest access to the software. It reduces the cost of their operations, because they’re not having to maintain the software, they’re not going through the upgrade process they used to have to go through.
So is [cloud] required? No. But it’s highly recommended. And the proof of that is customers are adopting it at a much faster pace than we expected. They were ready for it faster than we expected them to be ready for it. Because they see the business value—it’s not just because it’s a cool thing to do, they’re saving money by doing it and at the end of the day, that’s what they want.
Related: Why SaaS is the Future of Product Design
Do you have any advice for companies pursuing digital transformation?
I think the first advice is to not just think about this as buying a tool and implementing it. You need to think about it from a people, tools and processes standpoint. So you can buy new solutions, and you can implement those, and you will get benefit. But if you don’t really think about it from a holistic viewpoint, think about the organizational change management, the people’s acceptance of the new solution, the new processes, you don’t get the full benefit. And so absolutely you have to have all three if this is going to work. Otherwise you’ll spend a lot of money and you’ll only get half the benefit that you might have.
I think you also have to think about your organization’s appetite for change. Some companies kind of do the Big Bang, where they make a decision to do all of it, to implement the whole portfolio. Now, they may still do it with a phased approach, but they start with a roadmap. Other companies may look at it and say ‘okay, we understand your digital vision, and we like it. But for now, we’re only going to do your MES system, or we’re only going to do simulation.’
And so there are numerous factors. What are their business objectives? What do they really need to solve the most? What’s their budget? What’s their appetite for change? Sometimes they will adopt a smaller piece of it just because it’s easier to manage change on that scale, rather than try to get the whole organization changed at once. We try to work with them in a manner that that puts them on that path, that puts that foundation in to set the stage for them to be successful in the future.
Related: Digital Transformation 101: How to Choose the Right Technology
