I attended the PDSVISION forum for the first time, a two-day PLM event in Gothenburg organized by PTC’s largest implementer in the Nordics, also active in North America, the UK, and Germany.

The theme of the conference: Master your Digital Thread – a hot topic, as it has been discussed in various events, like the recent PLM Roadmap/PDT Europe conference in November 2023.

The event drew over 200 attendees, showing the commitment of participants, primarily from the Nordics, to knowledge sharing and learning.

The diverse representation included industry leaders like Vestas, pioneers in Sustainable Energy, and innovative startups like CorPower Ocean, who are dedicated to making wave energy reliable and competitive. Notably, the common thread among these diverse participants was their focus on sustainability, a growing theme in PLM conferences and an essential item on every board’s strategic agenda.

I enjoyed the structure and agenda of the conference. The first day was filled with lectures and inspiring keynotes. The second day was a day of interactive workshops divided into four tracks, which were of decent length so we could really dive into the topics. As you can imagine, I followed the sustainability track.

Here are some of my highlights of this conference.

 

Catching the Wind: A Digital Thread From Design to Service

Simon Saandvig Storbjerg, unfortunately remote,  gave an overview of the PLM-related challenges that Vestas is addressing. Vestas, the undisputed market leader in wind energy, is indirectly responsible for 231 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

One of the challenges of wind power energy is the growing complexity and need for variants. With continuous innovation and the size of the wind turbine, it is challenging to achieve economic benefits of scale.

As an example, Simon shared data related to the Lost Production Factor, which was around 5% in 2009 and reduced to 2% in 2017 and is now growing again. This trend is valid not only for Vestas but also for all wind turbine manufacturers, as variability is increasing.

Vestas is introducing modularity to address these challenges. I reported last year about their modularity journey related to the North European Modularity biannual meeting held at Vestas in Ringkøbing – you can read the post here.

Simon also addressed the importance of Model-Based Definition (MBD), which is crucial if you want to achieve digital continuity between engineering and manufacturing. In particular, in this industry, MBD is a challenge to involve the entire value chain, despite the fact that the benefits are proven and known. Change in people skills and processes remains a challenge.

 

The Future of Product Design and Development

The session led by PTC from Mark Lobo, General Manager for the PLM Segment, and Brian Thompson, General Manager of the CAD Segment, brought clarity to the audience on the joint roadmap of Windchill and Creo.

Mark and Brian highlighted the benefits of a Model-Based Enterprise and Model-Based Definition, which are musts if you want to be more efficient in your company and value chain.

The WHY is known, see the benefits described in the image, and requires new ways of working, something organizations need to implement anyway when aiming to realize a digital thread or digital twin.

In addition, Mark addressed PTC’s focus on Design for Sustainability and their partner network. In relation to materials science, the partnership with Ansys Granta MI is essential. It was presented later by Ansys and discussed on day two during one of the sustainability workshops.

Mark and Brian elaborated on the PTC SaaS journey – the future atlas platform and the current status of WindChill+ and Creo+, addressing a smooth transition from existing customers to a new future architecture.

And, of course, there was the topic of Artificial Intelligence.

Mark explained that PTC is exploring AI in various areas of the product lifecycle, like validating requirements, optimizing CAD models, streamlining change processes on the design side but also downstream activities like quality and maintenance predictions, improved operations and streamlined field services and service parts are part of the PTC Copilot strategy.

PLM combined with AI is for sure a topic where the applicability and benefits can be high to improve decision-making.

 

PLM Data Merge in the PTC Cloud: The Why & The How

Mikael Gustafson from Xylem, a leading Global Water Solutions provider, described their recently completed project: merging their on-premise Windchill instance TAPIR and their cloud Windchill XGV into a single environment.

TAPIR stands for Technical Administration, Part Information Repository and is very much part-centric and used in one organization. XGV stands for Xylem Global Vault, and it is used in 28 organizations with more of a focus on CAD data (Creo and AutoCAD). Two different siloes are to be joined in one instance to build a modern, connected, data-driven future or, as Mikael phrased it: “A step towards a more manageable Virtual Product“.

It was a severe project involving a lot of resources and time, again showing the challenges of migrations. I am planning to publish a blog post, the draft title “Migration Migraine,” as this type of migration is prevalent in many places because companies want to implement a single PLM backbone beyond (mechanical) engineering.

What I liked about the approach was its focus on assessing the risks and prioritizing a mitigation strategy if necessary. As the list below shows, even the COVID-19 pandemic was challenging the project.

Often, big migration projects fail due to optimism or by assessing some of the risks at the start and then giving it a go.

When failures happen, there is often the blame game: Was it the software, the implementer, or the customer (past or present) that caused the troubles? Mediating in such environments has been a long time my mission as the “Flying Dutchman,” and from my experience, it is not about the blame game; it is, most of the time, too high expectations and not enough time or resources to fully control this journey.

As Michael said, Xylem was successful, and during the go-live, only a few non-critical issues popped up.

When asked what he would do differently with the project’s hindsight, Mikael mentioned he would do the migrations not as a big project but as smaller projects.

I can relate a lot to this answer as, by experience, the “one-time” migration projects have created a lot of stress for the company, and only a few of them were successful.

 

Starting being coordinated and then connected

Several sessions were held where companies shared their PLM journey, to be mapped along the maturity slide (slide 8) I shared in my session: The Why, What and How of Digital Transformation in the PLM domain. You can review the content here on SlideShare.

There was Evolabel, a company starting its PLM journey because they are suffering from ineffective work procedures, information islands and the increasing complexity of its products.

Evolabel realized it needed PLM to realize its market ambition: To be a market leader within five years. For Evolabel, PLM is a must that is repeatable and integrated internally.

They shared how they first defined the required understanding and mindset for the needed capabilities before implementing them. In my terminology, they started to implement a coordinated PLM approach.

Teddy Svenson from JBT, a well-known manufacturer of food-tech solutions, described their next step in PLM. From an old AS/400 system with very little integration to PDM to a complete PLM system with parts, configurations, and change management.

It is not an easy task but a vital stepping stone for future development and a complete digital thread, from sales to customer care. In my terminology, they were upgrading their technology to improve their coordinated approach to be ready for the next digital evolution.

There were several other presentations on Day One – See the agenda here  I cannot cover them all given the limited size of this blog post.

 

The Workshops

As I followed the Sustainability track, I cannot comment much on the other track; however, given the presenters and the topics, they all appeared to be very pragmatic and interactive – given the format.

Achieving sustainability goals by integrating material intelligence into the design process

In the sustainability track, we started with Manuelle Clavel from Ansys Granta, who explained in detail how material data and its management are crucial for designing better-performing, more sustainable, and compliant products.

With the importance of compliance with (upcoming) regulations and the usage of material characteristics in the context of more sustainable products and being able to perform a Life Cycle Assessment, it is crucial to have material information digitally available, both in the CAD design environment as well in the PLM environment.

For me, a dataset of material properties is an excellent example of how it is used in a connected enterprise. You do not want to copy the information from system to system; it needs to be connected and available in real-time.

How can we design more sustainable products?

Together with Martin Lundqvist from QCM, I conducted an interactive session. We started with the need for digitalization, then looked at RoHS and REACH compliance and discussed the upcoming requirements of the Digital Product Passport.

We closed the session with a dialogue on the circular economy.

From the audience, we learned that many companies are still early in understanding the implementation of sustainability requirements and new processes. However, some were already quite advanced and acting. In particular, it is essential to know if your company is involved with batteries (DPP #1) or is close to consumers.

 

Conclusion

The PDSFORUM was for me an interesting experience for meeting companies at all different stages of their PLM journey. All sessions I attended were realistic, and the solutions were often pragmatic. In my day-to-day life, inspiring companies to understand a digital and sustainable future, you sometimes forget the journey everyone is going through.

Thanks, PDVISION, for inviting me to speak and learn at this conference.

and some sad news …..

I was sorry to learn that last week, Dr. Ken Versprille suddenly passed away. I know Ken, as shown in the picture – a passionate moderator and timekeeper of the PLM Roadmap / PDT conferences, well prepared for the details. May his spirit live through the future conferences – the next one already on May 8-9th in Washington, DC.