Autodesk has sponsored this post.
Every company should be digital. Such is the wisdom of the day. Once a company has become digitalized and data is flowing smoothly in all directions, it is said to have undergone a digital transformation.
A complete digitalization that results in a digital transformation may seem like a simple concept. What could be easier than converting analog processes, such as product brochures, product definition, inspection reports, owner’s manuals, etc., into a digital format? Most of us have already done so. For example, most manufacturers already have products defined with CAD—and have been doing it for years. The shop has long been producing parts with CNC machines. A generation has grown up creating documents on a word processor, never having seen a typewriter.
But many departments may have digitalized in their own way. They have all evolved to speak their own languages. Designers and engineers are speaking in one language, i.e., the language of their CAD files. The machine shop uses another language to produce the part. Like people of different regions, these islands of information need translators to make themselves understood. Information moves slowly over borders and stops completely if translation is unreliable.
To make matters worse, some departments may have yet to digitalize. Their processes still rely on paper. They may have thought themselves modernized by scanning drawings or storing papers as PDFs, but they are only succeeding in making electronic paper. That hardly qualifies as digitalization. Stuck in the backwaters and still clinging to paper is Quality Control, which to this day, does all its inspection reports on paper (more on that later).
Digitalized islands, each evolving separately, have difficulty communicating efficiently with each other. Data is not only in different formats, but it is also on different media. Think not just of paper, but data archived on magnetic media long since obsolete, such as floppy disks, tapes or CDs. Does anyone still have the drives to read them?
Therefore, the need to not only create digital data but also a system by which data moves seamlessly and without friction in all directions, can be accessed by the technical and nontechnical alike, has no delays and confusion, no snarls, no checkpoints—indeed no human intervention—is what will make a company digitally transformed.
One company that has undergone a digitalization is VisiConsult, a German company that offers digital X-ray and Computed Tomography (CT) systems to inspect manufactured parts in a non-destructive way. VisiConsult has digitally transformed and now has everyone on the same page.
Our procedures have become digitalized, says Lennart Schulenburg, Managing Director of VisiConsult. “There is not just a folder in someone’s desk on the 2nd floor that someone looks in every now and then,” he says. “We have processes in a digital workflow that everyone has to follow.”
A digital transformation relies on several enabling technologies and makes use of digital twins. Of particular importance are PLM and the cloud.
PLM can be the backbone of a digital transformation, but to be truly effective data must be easily accessible to all. Only then can a company be sure all will see the single, most current version of the company’s product or process. But with digitalization, the folder-in-someone’s-drawer problem gives way to another problem: the proliferation of files. Digital data can be duplicated with a mouse click or two, spawning multiple files, each unaware of the existence of the other or changes that may have rendered them obsolete.
Keeping confusion to a minimum was once the domain of PDM and elaborate schemes with check-in/check-out procedures and version control. But as the data storage was local or on local networks, access by geographically disbursed teams with their networks by external stake holders (customers, partners and vendors) was still a vexation and relied on the IT department to make sure moving parts did not grind to a halt.
The cloud, quite simply, does away with all that. With PLM on the cloud, leading companies have found the easiest method of assuring all stakeholders of a single source of truth and a path to digital transformation.
For more information, see Autodesk’s take on digital transformation for manufacturing.