PTC’s annual LiveWorx event came back to a physical conference format this year. The last time users were face-to-face with the leaders of the Boston-based PLM, digital transformation and engineering software company was in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, without further ado, Jim Heppelmann, president of PTC, kicked off the show by putting the spotlight on the core of PTC’s current vision, “the transition from virtual to physical product, and the need to seamlessly track change variability across the lifecycle.” Furthermore, asset management, compliance, environmental footprint and manufacturing sustainability were hot topics on the agenda.
Another main message was the positioning of field-service management (FSM) and product lifecycle management (PLM) as a closed-loop suite across ServiceMax and Windchill, with an integrated asset-centric approach to proactively drive the “as maintained” product configurations. Bridging R&D and Operations has always been a strong theme in PTC’s endeavours to improve product performance. This year’s conference is no exception, but the message became louder and clearer. For instance, since PTC invested in ServiceMax from 2015, their partnership culminated in the $1.46 billion acquisition of the company announced late in 2022 and which completed in early January this year. As a result, more can be revealed, and the messaging is streamlined now that only one organization is in the driver’s seat.
Clearly there is a lot to dissect, and now that the dust has settled, I will review some of the key messages delivered through the LiveWorx 2023 conference.
PTC’s “Plus” Strategy: SaaS Everything
Heppelmann highlighted that 25 percent of PTC’s value is already delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Going forward, the growing SaaS versus on-premises adoption trend is only forecasted to increase as companies want to focus on innovation, productivity and growing their market share—not managing enterprise platforms. To that end, PTC unveiled its goal to “bring SaaS to life across its entire solution portfolio” through the Atlas strategy. It started with existing SaaS offerings, from Onshape to Arena, and extended to Windchill+, Creo+, Thingworx+, Codebeamer+, Vuforia+ and more. Clearly, the “plus” is PTC’s way of highlighting its cloud transition strategies.
PTC then announced that it is bringing its relationship with Ansys to the next level. Building on the strategic alliance started in 2018, the two giants are working together to build an integrated ecosystem across Creo and Ansys towards a simulation lifecycle management solution. This includes multiple capabilities, from material intelligence with Granta, to CAD requirement management on the PLM side.
A New Vision for Service
Service lifecycle management (SLM) and asset lifecycle management (ALM) are not new. PTC has been investing in this space for years by connecting digital and physical twins across the product lifecycle. With the ServiceMax addition, PTC brings the customer relations angle to light by integrating customer relationship management (CRM) tools within the wider product ecosystem. This creates new opportunities for marketing, product development and operations to leverage closed-loop insights from customer sentiment and product usage. PTC refers to the entire journey as “model-based digital thread,” which includes:
- Asset systems of record: how feedback loops integrate across smart connected products, warranty claims, service information, work execution, 3D work instructions and spare parts management.
- Customer definitions: how customer information feeds back to operations from a product service point of view, also leveraging new data insights from usage.
- Digital product definition: how such feedback loops inform future product requirements, driving towards continuous improvement and increased customer satisfaction.
Connecting the threads implies using technology to drive better decision making at various levels. For example, IIoT helps bring digital information to shop floor technicians on the front line, overlaying 3D product data downstream in the context of service operations. AR technologies help with immersive visualization, improving operations accuracy and speed when disassembling, assembling or troubleshooting product components and processes, leveraging real-time access to electronic work instructions. In addition, ALM technology includes how service monitoring and software or firmware updates can be delivered over the air to in-field products.
Embracing Agile and Sustainability
Online collaboration and agility are the norm in software development. The change is that agile is becoming more prominent across all product components as software and hardware converge; technology brings agile development processes to life through time-boxed sprints. Continuous innovation is also about aligning data toward greater manufacturing execution and sustainability, leveraging insights from:
- Rich configured 3D product models, from requirements to design: defining what can be manufactured, where and in which factory.
- Bills of process, control characteristics, quality control plans, cycle times and resources: tracking change impacts to supply chain and manufacturing processes.
- Machine learning, IIoT, feedback loop engineering and model-based digital threads: delivering consistently across the execution framework and assessing scenarios by leveraging analytical insights across PLM, MES and more.
Circular opportunities such as design for sustainability were also heavily discussed in context of leveraging agility, distributed manufacturing and modularity. Some use cases that were mentioned include:
- Balancing product performance and cost with carbon footprint impacts.
- Leveraging simulation to optimize product performance, material selection, processing, end-quality and cost, but also improving downstream serviceability and sustainability.
- Optimizing energy management, from supply chain and factory operations, logistics to product performance.
- Reducing waste management and improving product end-of-life management and recycling.
The takeaway here is that both agility and sustainability are not options anymore; they must be part of the end-to-end value proposition through each stage of the product lifecycle.