Day 1 of the virtual conference, PLM Road Map & PDT Fall 2021, was held today, November 16, 2021, under the title “DISRUPTION—the PLM Professionals’ Exploration of Emerging Technologies that Will Reshape the PLM Value Equation.” Mr. Peter Bilello, President and CEO of CIMdata and Mr. Håkan Kårdén, Director of Marketing, Eurostep, welcomed over 150 attendees. After a brief introduction, they passed the baton to Dr. Ken Versprille, Executive Consultant, CIMdata, who moderated the speaker sessions.
Mr. Peter Bilello gave the keynote address, “The Critical Dozen: 12 familiar evolving trends and enablers of digital transformation that you cannot or should not live without.”
Mr. Bilello spoke of the speed-up of change that CIMdata has seen in industry to digitalize and automate their processes. He noted the interrelated factors forcing change, including the extraction of data, disruption in the supply chain, the growth of electronics in product development, new manufacturing techniques, and new materials, His list of the 12 trends and enablers included:
- End to end connectivity
- Data & process management
- Ensuring all data is under Configuration Management control
- Bill of information – the core product model
- Model-based structures
- Digital thread
- Digital twin
- IoT and PLM
- A changed view of “product”
- Big data and analytics
- Data governance
- Digital skills transformation
His closing message to industrial companies was that they must address all the elements to succeed.
Next was a joint presentation by Mr. Kenny Swope, Senior Manager - Architecture Integration & Interoperability Standards, of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Mr. Jean-Yves Delaunay, PLM Interoperability Expert, of Airbus on data and process standards, titled “The Business Value of Standards-based Information Interoperability for Aerospace & Defense.” The presentation detailed the interoperability problem that aerospace companies have with data and the business value of a proper solution.
They noted the “Quadrant” of criteria included expert users defining their standards need, solution providers incorporating the standards, the aerospace supply chain using the standards, and the industry fully adopting them. They then listed the specific standards, many of them ISO approved, that the A&D PLM Action Group administered by CIMdata has recommended for use by their different workgroups.
After a short break, Mr. Torbjörn Holm, a Founder of Eurostep, continued with the standards topic. He gave examples in history for the need for standards. He emphasized industry requirements, avoiding vendor lock-in, and the need to manage products in a long lifecycle. In his opinion, most technical leaps include standards, and he offered that the best standards are user-driven.
Mr. Greg Weaver, Director of Corporate PLM at Gulfstream Aerospace, delivered the next presentation. The catchphrase title was “Indexing Content – Finding Your Needle in the Haystack.” He offered that 3D model-based definition was the pinnacle of design. He asked the rhetorical question–at what level do you drive your MBD requirements into the supply chain? Mr. Weaver noted that the digital model and the paper world do co-exist. He detailed how Gulfstream deployed Dassault Systèmes’ Exalead search engine to index the past 35 years of documents. Today Gulfstream users can search and retrieve document information in minutes.
Mr. Martijn Dullaart, Business Architect Enterprise Configuration Management, ASML, ended the day with his upbeat presentation on configuration management titled, “The Next disruption please …” He emphasized the impact model-based has on configuration management. He also alluded to the idea that the digital thread is more of a network. In ending, he said the focus on configuration management must support rapid change, be adaptive and adjust for change, as well as digital to allow automation.
