Last week I posted my first review of the PDT Europe conference. You can read the details here: The weekend after PDT Europe (part 1).  There were some questions related to the abbreviation PDT. Understanding the history of PDT, you will discover it stands for Product Data Technology. Yes, there are many TLA’s in this world.

Microsoft’s view on the digital twin

Now back to the conference. Day 2 started with a remote session from Simon Floyd. Simon is Microsoft’s Managing Director for Manufacturing Industry Architecture Enterprise Services and a frequent speaker at PDT. Simon shared with us Microsoft’s viewpoint of a Digital Twin, the strategy to implement a Digit Twin, the maturity status of several of their reference customers and areas these companies are focusing. From these customers it was clear most companies focused on retrieving data in relation to maintenance, providing analytics and historical data. Futuristic scenarios like using the digital twin for augmented reality or design validation. As I discussed in the earlier post, this relates to my observations, where creating a digital thread between products in operations is considered as a quick win. Establishing an end-to-end relationship between products in operation and their design requires many steps to fix. Read my post: Why PLM is the forgotten domain in digital transformation.

When discussing the digital twin architecture, Simon made a particular point for standards required to connect the results of products in the field. Connecting a digital twin in a vendor-specific framework will create a legacy, vendor lock-in, and less open environment to use digital twins. A point that I also raised in my presentation later that day.

Simon concluded with a great example of potential future Artificial Intelligence, where an asset based on its measurements predicts to have a failure before the scheduled maintenance stop and therefore requests to run with a lower performance so it can reach the maintenance stop without disruption.

Closing the lifecycle loop

Sustainability and the circular economy has been a theme at PDT for some years now too. In his keynote speech, Torbjörn Holm from Eurostep took us through the global megatrends (Hay group 2030) and the technology trends (Gartner 2018) and mapped out that technology would be a good enabler to discuss several of the global trends.

Next Torbjörn took us through the reasons and possibilities (methodologies and tools) for product lifecycle circularity developed through the ResCoM project in which Eurostep participated.

The ResCoM project (Resource Conservative Manufacturing) was a project co-funded by the European Commission and recently concluded. More info at www.rescom.eu

Torbjörn concluded discussing the necessary framework for Digital Twin and Digital Thread(s), which should be based on a Model-Based Definition, where ISO 10303 is the best candidate.

Later in the afternoon, there were three sessions in a separate track, related to design optimization for value, circular and re-used followed by a panel discussion. Unfortunate I participated in another track, so I have to digest the provided materials still. Speakers in that track were Ola Isaksson (Chalmers University), Ingrid de Pauw & Bram van der Grinten (IDEAL&CO) and Michael Lieder (KTH Sweden)

Connecting many stakeholders

Rebecca Ihrfors, CIO from the Swedish Defense Material Administration (FMV) shared her plans on transforming the IT landscape to harmonize the current existing environments and to become a broker between industry and the armed forces (FM). As now many of the assets come with their own data sets and PDM/PLM environments, the overhead to keep up all these proprietary environments is too expensive and fragmented. FWM wants to harmonize the data they retrieve from industry and the way they offer it to the armed forces in a secure way. There is a need for standards and interoperability.

The positive point from this presentation was that several companies in the audience and delivering products to Swedish Defense could start to share and adapt their viewpoints how they could contribute.

Later in the afternoon, there were three sessions in a separate track rented to standards for MBE inter-operability and openness that would fit very well in this context. Brian King (Koneksys), Adrian Murton (Airbus UK) and Magnus Färneland (Eurostep) provided various inputs, and as I did not attend these parallel sessions I will dive deeper in their presentations at a later time

PLM something has to change – bimodal and more

In my presentation, which you can download from SlideShare here: PLM – something has to change. My main points were related to the fact that apparently, companies seem to understand that something needs to happen to benefit really from a digital enterprise. The rigidness from large enterprise and their inhibitors to transform are more related to human and incompatibility issues with the future.

How to deal with this incompatibility was also the theme for Martin Eigner’s presentation (System Lifecycle Management as a bimodal IT approach) and Marc Halpern’s closing presentation (Navigating the Journey to Next Generation PLM).

Martin Eigner’s consistent story was about creating an extra layer on top of the existing (Mode 1) systems and infrastructure, which he illustrated by a concept developed based on Aras.

By providing a new digital layer on top of the existing enterprise, companies can start evolving to a modern environment, where, in the long-term, old Mode 1 systems will be replaced by new digital platforms (Mode 2). Oleg Shilovitsky wrote an excellent summary of this approach. Read it here: Aras PLM  platform “overlay” strategy explained.

Marc Halpern closed the conference describing his view on how companies could navigate to the Next Generation PLM by explaining in more detail what the Gartner bimodal approach implies. Marc’s story was woven around four principles.

Principle 1 The bimodal strategy as the image shows.

Principle 2 was about Mode 1 thinking in an evolutionary model. Every company has to go through maturity states in their organization, starting from ad-hoc, departmental, enterprise-based to harmonizing and fully digital integrated. These maturity steps also have to be taken into account when planning future steps.

Principle 3 was about organizational change management, a topic often neglected or underestimated by product vendors or service providers as it relates to a company culture, not easy to change and navigate in a particular direction.

Finally, Principle 4 was about Mode 2 activities. Here an organization should pilot (in a separate environment), certify (make sure it is a realistic future), adopt (integrate it in your business) and scale (enable this new approach to exists and grow for the future).

Conclusions

This post concludes my overview of PDT Europe 2017. Looking back there was a quiet aligned view of where we are all heading with PLM and related topics. There is the hype an there is reality, and I believe this conference was about reality, giving good feedback to all the attendees what is really happening and understood in the field. And of course, there is the human factor, which is hard to influence.

Share your experiences and best practices related to moving to the next generation of PLM (digital PLM ?) !