Getting in deeper with Stan Przybylinski

CIMdata talks about product lifecycle management (PLM) extending from idea through life. Product ideas can emerge from anywhere (the notion of scribbling on a cocktail napkin is often evoked) but one hopes that the idea is inspired by real customer needs. Before the age of smart connected products, most product companies got customer feedback through warranty claims, customer returns or complaints, and focused research with end customers. But that information is filtered, to a certain extent, by the customers providing the information. For example, people may not readily admit (unsafely) using a product in ways for which it was not intended or they just may not remember the details. Today, with smart connected products, those products can be designed to capture a vast range of information about product usage. Think of our smartphones festooned with cameras, accelerometers, GPS, pedometers, finger print readers, and much more. Product companies can now know more about how their products are actually used than ever before. Many solution providers are talking about closing the product development loop from field usage back to product development to better define new and improved products.

Of course, companies will be able to better target innovation in existing products. This will help for smart connected products in a wide range of industries. But most products have a short lifecycle in our throwaway society. (Those promoting the Circular Economy are trying to change that.) The dominance of smart connected products can help as well, with much of the value in many products delivered in the embedded software. If the software can be updated the product useful life can be extended.

Long-lived assets are a much more interesting case. These products are deployed and maintained over a long period. Many companies make as much if not more profit from parts and maintenance over the lifecycle than from the original purchase. There is the old expression about giving away the razor to sell the blades, but most companies are making money both ways, of course. Some long-lived assets are leased but the trend in the market today is product-as-a-service, where customers sign a service level agreement (SLA) that defines availability and quality of service metrics for the duration of the agreement. Product companies have to design their products to meet (or exceed) these metrics. The designs also need to include the necessary “smartening” technology to monitor product operation and ensure timely and effective maintenance. It would be much more difficult to succeed at a product-as-a-service strategy with dumb products.

All of the major PLM solution providers are supporting the development of smart connected products with their offerings at some level. Smart connected products typically have mechanical, electrical/electronic, and software components and each provider has their own strategy to support each part of the total product development. Mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD) solutions are central to development and most providers either offer them directly or integrate with tools provided by others (and usually both). Only a few have made moves in electronic design automation (EDA) and software development tools besides partnering and/or offering integrations. Siemens Digital Industries Software did make a big splash with their acquisition of leading EDA solution provider Mentor Graphics. Both PTC and Siemens acquired software development tool providers to integrate into their portfolio (MKS and Polarion Software, respectively). SAP is working to leverage software development and system engineering tools from their Sybase acquisition.

It is one thing to have tools for each discipline, but how are these tools being used in industry? Another presentation at the CIMdata PLM Market & Industry Forum will focus on “Synching Siloed Development.” This title suggests the current state of the practice: these three elements of the total product are often developed in their own silos.

What is important for closed-loop product development is planning designs to incorporate the necessary sensors, on-board computing, and communications technology to capture the raw data necessary to provide the desired feedback. This design process must also consider how the captured information is communicated back from the fielded unit. This raises the complexity to a system of systems problem, with potential interactions with the cloud and edge computing resources.

Today, a lot of that communication is mediated by IoT applications that consume field data from smart connected products and display that data, or key process indicators (KPIs) derived from it, on dashboards that are often mashups of IoT data/KPIs and other related information, e.g., maps showing geolocation, other enterprise data, etc. All of the major PLM solution providers have IoT strategies, some developing offerings in-house and others mainly through acquisition. Some are also leveraging augmented reality (AR) to deliver this information in the field.

One open question that drove inclusion of this topic in the Forum agenda was how the loop is actually closed, i.e., what information is passed to where in the lifecycle and how? Current practice in some industries can provide some guidance. In the medical device industry there are strict rules about data the needs to be captured across the product lifecycle, in effect mandating a “digital thread” well before the phrase became popular. The Corrective Action Preventative Action (CAPA) process used for medical devices captures real-world feedback and traverses the digital thread back to determine where a problem might have occurred or a decision taken that resulted in a customer experience in the field. This presentation will look at how processes and techniques from other domains might best apply to enable closed-loop product development.