There is a new concept emerging in PLM: expanding digital twins from representing products, systems and assets to representing entire enterprises.
In this article, I am returning to fundamental questions that often baffle technology users—many times to the surprise of those who earn a living from technology. In an earlier article, I addressed some basic queries: What does PLM actually mean, how do I know if I need it and what questions should be asked to figure that out?
I want to start by taking a step back. These questions may seem inane and answering them may seem unhelpful. Still, they address challenges in comprehensive PLM implementations—the complexity of end-to-end connectivity and their digital threads, webs and networks—whatever they are labeled.
It’s a distressing fact that very few PLM implementations ever reach their ultimate projected goal. The reason is no mystery: implementers often do not push the project through to completion. They don’t “stay the course.”
A big part of the remedy is preventing key people from being peeled away to other major projects.
Big-picture context
The effort to ensure funding and resources for the three or more years needed to implement any major enterprise-class transformation must never be overlooked. The cost of a major transformation could add up to several million dollars—sometimes much more. The usual celebrations of incremental small wins persuade no one unless those wins are placed in a big-picture context.
As I have witnessed again and again, failure to keep everyone focused is the top reason why PLM implementations don’t scale up from the project and the business unit.
Maintaining staff and project management focus is also essential in bringing information technology (IT), operational technology (OT) and engineering technology (ET) together with PLM. While bringing IT, OT and ET together can also be done with enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, it’s not recommended, even if the enterprise is supply-chain intensive.
True to its predecessor, material resource planning (MRP), ERP focuses on enterprise resources—primarily money, people, orders, supplies and facilities. But as PLM users know, the enterprise (or a product or an asset) is much more than the sum of its resources and inputs. Digital twins of the enterprise must represent its structure—how its dozens (or hundreds) of moving parts are sustained, enhanced and kept in synch. Thus, a PLM representation of the enterprise focuses on the organizations It encompasses and the activities that support each line of business along with their relationships, internal stresses and all the frictions among them.
Thus, the digital twins of the enterprise are about much more than inputs and resources. For starters, the digital threads of enterprise-scale digital twins must connect to anything and everything that enhances competitiveness and profitability—or that threatens how they work together. Ensuring long-term sustainability in this way requires that any focus on factors external to the digital twins must be matched by a focus on the internals.
As for IT, OT and ET, PLM has increasingly accessible capabilities. These are now truly powerful business platforms that clarify and simplify complex challenges and, most importantly, ensure the timely delivery of world-class products to the marketplace.
This I see as Right-to-Market—the right product, to the right market, at the right time, with the right capabilities, at the right price. Enabled by PLM, Right-to-Market builds enterprise sustainability by ensuring that:
• Even the most competitive rivals can be outperformed.
• Marketplace presence is strengthened with collaboration and innovation that span the enterprise.
• Keeping customers happy is a central focus.
• Builds in long-term profitability for the enterprise—the justification for implementing every large-scale technology.
Right-to-Market is in sync with enterprise-class PLM. This means expanding the implementation of PLM until its digital twins represent the entire enterprise, not just its products and assets. PLM is already in common and profitable use to manage all the individual assets and systems that, along with people, make up the enterprise.
Right-to-Market means completing digital transformation and much more. This ensures that collaboration and innovation work closely with and build on each other and that they mesh smoothly with engineering, production, marketing and service, as well as connecting the enterprise’s IT, OT and ET process and technology environments.
Enterprise-class PLM is the only viable way to achieve this top-level integration, which is bringing IT, OT and ET together. No other solution or technology has the capabilities and resources necessary to support enterprise re-creation on this scale. And only in this way can marketplace rivals be outperformed.
Enterprise-class PLM and the transformations inherent in Right-to-Market lead to smarter evaluations, quicker interpretations of data and information and fewer errors. Enterprise-class PLM helps analysts and decision-makers see the big picture the marketplace presents, to reconcile conflicting viewpoints and to overcome resistance to change—all while silos of information are opened, connected and integrated.
This brings me to the next question: How do we determine whether operations are big enough, complex enough, or if the company’s products and/or services are sufficiently complex to benefit from PLM?
Essentially, this means taking an inventory of product, asset and system complexities and their viability. Here are a few useful indicators:
• The enterprise has sufficiently sophisticated products and assets to meet foreseeable customer needs.
• The connectedness and effectiveness of the information processing embedded in products with built-in electronics and supporting software.
• The growing need for products, assets and systems to accommodate change that is abrupt and all-pervasive.
This last point includes new physical, mechanical and materials capabilities; new production and service processes; built-in electronics and embedded information processing; artificial and augmented intelligence; evolving customer expectations and demands; a changing cast of aggressive competitors; and new opportunities in core markets and adjacent segments.
Following this effort, a concerted push may be needed to measure the sophistication of the enterprise’s assets and systems in terms of their competitiveness, profitability and sustainability. Bearing in mind that sophistication and complexity are inseparable, the focus here is:
• Determining and enhancing long-term sustainability and profitability of assets.
• Verifying the soundness of product and asset service lives in terms of marketplace shifts, changes in demand and competitive initiatives.        Â
• Quickly identifying and exploiting new marketplace opportunities.
• Identifying assets suitable for Product-as-a-Service (PaaS) business models.
• Finding profitable uses for under-utilized capabilities.
• Identifying and disposing of obsolete assets, ending the use of outdated processes and avoiding creeping obsolescence with its potential to ambush business plans.
If these analyses and inventories are done conscientiously, almost every organization will quickly see that it will benefit from implementing PLM or broadening its use.
When digital twins grow to support the enterprise, digital threads link them to everything in its marketplace, imposing huge demands on the breadth and depth of connectivity. On the other hand, less granularity is probably needed than what is customary for a product or asset, keeping the appropriate enterprise digital twins within manageable and usable proportions.
Moreover, digital twins, digital threads and their connectivity change endlessly, which points to a reality of PLM in its ultimate configuration—its need for ongoing support similar to the support invested in IT, ET, or OT.
Strategic business approach
Think about it: while the lifecycle of the enterprise is infinite, everyday product and asset models can quickly mushroom to intimidating proportions, requiring many digital threads and a great variety of connectivity. Hence, the meanings of “end-to-end” and “lifecycle” can change daily.
As every project manager knows, justifications can morph into expectations and then into benchmarks for progress and gauges of success, often with little leeway. Support inevitably wanes without meeting these gauges and measurements or at least acknowledging the constant updates and modifications. As anyone working in technology realizes, the passage of time requires more funding support and more staff resources, not less. This may seem obvious, but I find that the implications are often overlooked.
Change has become abrupt and all-pervasive—new physical, mechanical and materials capabilities; built-in electronics and embedded information processing; artificial and augmented intelligence; evolving customer expectations and demands; a changing cast of aggressive competitors; and new opportunities in core markets and adjacent segments.
As a long-time definer and observer of PLM, I do not doubt the viability of digital twins that are sufficiently robust to accommodate the entire enterprise. This is what I mean by Right-to-Market—ensuring the enterprise is optimally configured to enable and sustain long-term success in its marketplace(s). This ultimately means that the enterprise consistently maximizes its return on investment.
And so, the inevitable technology user’s question: can PLM solution providers’ tools support Right-to-Market? Yes, as evidenced by their nonstop development of new capabilities, simultaneous uptake of new technologies and ongoing accommodations to structural changes in marketplaces.
This is aided by using the Cloud in its broadest sense with the introduction of product-focused and technology-focused platforms easily connected to feed ever-larger and evolving digital twins.
Complexity often hamstrings implementations but getting a handle on it and “taming it” is why we take the risks that always accompany new technologies. Failure to implement exposes us to risks that, over time, can only worsen. And in today’s global marketplaces, basing decisions on “what has always happened” is riskier than ever.
This is why every organization needs to embrace PLM as the strategic business approach it is.
