It was a great pleasure to attend my favorite vendor-neutral PLM conference this year in Gothenburg—approximately 150 attendees, where most have expertise in the PLM domain.

We had the opportunity to learn new trends, discuss reality, and meet our peers.

The theme of the conference was:Value Drivers for Digitalization of the Product Lifecycle, a topic I have been discussing in my recent blog posts, as we need help and educate companies to understand the importance of digitalization for their business.

The two-day conference covered various lectures – view the agenda here – and of course the topic of AI was part of half of the lectures, giving the attendees a touch of reality.

In this first post, I will cover the main highlight of Day 1.

 

Value Drivers for Digitalization of the Product Lifecycle

As usual, the conference started with Peter Bilello, president & CEO of CIMdata, stressing again that when implementing a PLM strategy, the maximum result comes from a holistic approach, meaning look at the big picture, don’t just focus on one topic.

It was interesting to see again the classic graph (below) explaining the benefits of the end-to-end approach – I believe it is still valid for most companies; however, as I shared in my session the next day, implementing concepts of a Products Service System will require more a DevOp type of graph (more next week).

Next, Peter went through the CIMdata’s critical dozen with some updates. You can look at the updated 2024 image here.

Some of the changes: Digital Thread and Digital Twin are merged– as Digital Twins do not run on documents. And instead of focusing on Artificial Intelligence only,  CIMdata introduced Augmented Intelligence as we should also consider solutions that augment human activities, not just replace them.

Peter also shared the results of a recent PLM survey where companies were asked about their main motivation for PLM investments. I found the result a little discouraging for several reasons:

The number one topic is still faster, cheaper and better – almost 65 % of the respondents see this as their priority. This number one topic illustrates that Sustainability has not reached the level of urgency, and perhaps the topic can be found in standards compliance.

Many of the companies with Sustainability in their mission should understand that a digital PLM infrastructure is the foundation for most initiatives, like Lifecycle Analysis (LCA). Sustainability is more than part of standards compliance, if it was mentioned anyway.

The second disappointing observation for the understanding of PLM is that customer support is mentioned only by 15 % of the companies. Again, connecting your products to your customers is the first step to a DevOp approach, and you need to be able to optimize your product offering to what the customer really wants.

 

Digital Transformation of the Value Chain in Pharma

The second keynote was from Anders Romare, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Novo Nordisk. Anders has been participating in the PDT conference in the past. See my 2016 PLM Roadmap/PDT Europe post, where Anders presented on behalf of Airbus: Digital Transformation through an e2e PLM backbone.

Anders started by sharing some of the main characteristics of the companies he has been working for. Volvo, Airbus and now Novo Nordisk. It is interesting to compare these characteristics as they say a lot about the industry’s focus. See below:

Anders is now responsible for digital transformation in Novo Nordisk, which is a challenge in a heavily regulated industry.

One of the focus areas for Novo Nordisk in 2024 is also Artificial Intelligence, as you can see from the image to the left (click on it for the details).

As many others in this conference, Anders mentioned AI can only be applicable when it runs on top of accurate data.

Understanding the potential of AI, they identified 59 areas where AI can create value for the business, and it is interesting to compare the traditional PLM curve Peter shared in his session with the potential AI-enabled drug-development curve as presented by Anders below:

Next, Anders shared some of the example cases of this exploration, and if you are interested in the details, visit their tech.life site.

When talking about the engineering framing of PLM, it was interesting to learn from Anders, who had a long history in PLM before Novo Nordisk, when he replied to a question from the audience that he would never talk about PLM at the management level. It’s very much aligned with my Don’t mention the P** word post.

 

A Strategy for the Management of Large Enterprise PLM Platforms

One of the highlights for me on Day 1 was Jorgen Dahl‘s presentation. Jorgen, a senior PLM director at GE Aerospace, shared their story towards a single PLM approach needed due to changes in businesses. And addressing the need for a digital thread also comes with an increased need for uptime.

I like his strategy to execution approach, as shown in the image below, as it contains the most important topics. The business vision and understanding, the imagination of the end status and What must be True?

In my experience, the three blocks are iteratively connected. When describing the strategy, you might not be able to identify the required capabilities and management systems yet.

But then, when you start to imagine the ideal end state, you will have to consider them. And for companies, it is essential to be ambitious – or, as Jorgen stated, uncomfortable ambitious. Go for the 75 % to almost 100 % to be true. Also, asking What must be True is an excellent way to allow people to be involved and creatively explore the next steps.

Note: This approach does not provide all the details, as it will be a multiyear journey of learning and adjusting towards the future. Therefore, the strategy must be aligned with the culture to avoid continuous top-down governance of the details. In that context, Jorgen stated:

“Culture is what happens when you leave the room.”

It is a more positive statement than the famous Peter Drucker’s quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Jorgen’s concluding slide mentions potential common knowledge, although I believe the way Jorgen used the right easy-to-digest points will be helpful for all organizations to step back, look at their initiatives, and compare where they can improve.

 

 How a Business Capability Model and Application Portfolio Management Support Through Changing Times

Peter Vind‘s presentation was nicely connected to the presentation from Jorgen Dahl. Peter, who is an enterprise architect at Siemens Energy, started by explaining where the enterprise architect fits in an organization and comparing it to a city.

In his entertaining session, he mentioned he has to deal with the unicorns at the C-level, who, like politicians in a city, sometimes have the most “innovative” ideas – can they be realized?

Peter explained how they used Business Capability Modeling when Siemens Energy went through various business stages. First, the carve-out from Siemens AG and later the merger with Siemens Gamesa. Their challenge is to understand which capabilities remain, which are new or overlapping, both during the carve-out and merging process.

TIME explained

The business capability modeling leads to a classification of the applications used at different levels of the organization, such as customer-facing, operational, or supporting business capabilities.

Next, for the lifecycle of the applications, the TIME approach was used, meaning that each application was mapped to business fitness and technical fitness. Click on the diagram to see the details.

The result could look like the mapping shown below – a comprehensive overview of where the action is

It is a rational approach; however, Peter mentioned that we also should be aware of the HIPPOs in an organization. If there is a HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)  in play, you might face a political battle too.

It was a great educational session illustrating the need for an Enterprise Architect, the value of business capabilities modeling and the TIME concept.

 

And some more …

There were several other exciting presentations during day 1; however, as not all presentations are publicly available, I cannot discuss them in detail; I just looked at my notes.

Driving Trade Compliance and Efficiency

Peter Sandeck, Director of Project Management at TE Connectivity shared what they did to motivate engineers to endorse their Jurisdiction and Classification Assessment (JCA) process. Peter showed how, through a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) approach and listening to the end-users, they reached a higher Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score after several iterations of the solution developed for the JCA process.

This approach is an excellent example of an agile method in which engineers are involved. My remaining question is still – are the same engineers in the short term also pushed to make lifecycle assessments? More work; however, I believe if you make it personal, the same MVP approach could work again.

 

Value of Model-Based Product Architecture

Jussi Sippola, Chief Expert, Product Architecture Management & Modularity at Wärtsilä, presented an excellent story related to the advantages of a more modular product architecture. Where historically, products were delivered based on customer requirements through the order fulfillment process, now there is in parallel the portfolio management process, defining the platform of modules, features and options.

Jussi mentioned that they were able to reduce the number of parts by 50 % while still maintaining the same level of customer capabilities. In addition, thanks to modularity, they were able to reduce the production lead time by 40 % – essential numbers if you want to remain competitive.

 

Conclusion

Day 1 was a day where we learned a lot as an audience, and in addition, the networking time and dinner in the evening were precious for me and, I assume, also for many of the participants. In my next post, we will see more about new ways of working, the AI dream and Sustainability.

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