Today’s products are impacting all areas of our lives in profound ways. They’re smarter, more connected and capable. They communicate bidirectionally and are capable of analyzing data and optimally responding in real-time. And, increasingly, many products can even fully operate autonomously.
While the opportunities and possibilities are exciting for the manufacturers of these products, these smarter, connected, adaptable products are also far more complex to design, engineer and manufacture—especially using traditional tools, methods and processes.
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50%
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of automotive costs will be electronics-based by 2030.1
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5.8x
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growth in the IoT market between 2017-2025 (to $1.1T).2
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3.2x
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growth in AI systems spending between 2018-2022 (to $77.6B).3
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Too often, members of a product team are segregated by the very tools and software that are supposed to accelerate their efforts. For example, the mechanical design and engineering teams are siloed from their peers responsible for the electronics of a product.
Teams lack visibility into the current, single version of “truth” when it comes to the latest project data from every member of every team. Instead, they’re trapped reviewing designs and files they requested from peers, that are often outdated by the time they’ve begun to make any required modifications—so they end up making adjustments that may no longer work with more recent changes, increasing risk, errors and frustration.
This siloed approach is already creating unnecessary increases in costs and time to market—problems that will only increase as products continue to become more intelligent and complex. And these challenges are occurring when time to market and competitive differentiation are more critical than ever.
We’re at a major inflection point in how products are designed, engineered and manufactured. The companies who resolve these challenges will be the leaders of the next generation of products.
Fortunately, Siemens Digital Industries Software foresaw those challenges and developed an integrated suite of solutions that enable manufacturers to design, engineer and build better, smarter products, faster and more cost efficiently, with less risk.
We call this seamless, data-driven approach digital transformation. And it will enable and accelerate new, exciting opportunities in how we create the products that fundamentally change our lives.
We invite you to learn more about the foundational and differentiating advantages built into our Xcelerator portfolio that are already driving digital transformation for leading manufacturers across a variety of industries.
Most of us have seen high-level soccer games—where top teams know that scoring requires continuous, intelligent, simultaneous movement from all players to create opportunities, with fast, high-precision passes to where receiving teammates are or will be at that exact moment in time to maximize their scoring opportunities and avoid trouble.
If one step breaks down, opportunities are lost, and the team must battle to regain control. Team success is based on complex interdependencies, and each player’s real-time visibility of the overall field and his teammates.
Now imagine if those players were isolated, wearing blinders throughout most of the game that prevented them from continuously seeing or knowing where their teammates or the ball currently were—with only occasional bursts of full field visibility. How effective do you think they would be?
Yet that’s how many of the world’s products are created today. The various design, engineering, software and manufacturing teams are isolated—often working in parallel, but with blinders on, preventing them from knowing what other teams are currently doing.
The blinders are created by multiple challenges. Often, each team uses different software that focuses solely on their tasks. They create file formats that aren’t compatible with other teams’ software. Each team’s project files, information and current work-in-progress exist in siloed repositories. And, teams lack insights that would help them do their job better, faster and more easily.
Siemens Digital Industries Software avoids that broken process—and the competitive downside that goes with it—by empowering teams with a seamless, integrated and collaborative suite of solutions that break down traditional barriers.
“Parallel, but isolated and blind.” That’s how too many teams create products today.
Think of all the teams involved in a modern product: mechanical design, electronics, software engineering, electrical, manufacturing and more. Typically, each team uses disparate tools to do their work, so every change—every adjustment in the positioning, power consumption, size, weight or other characteristic of a part, however minor—can have a significant impact on the work other teams are doing.
When not immediately visible, the impact of changes across the complex web of interdependencies—upstream or downstream—can be significant.
This “two steps forward, one step back” process is the root cause of excessive cost increases, greater risk and significant delays in getting new products to market. Resolving those problems is tedious and adds zero value to the quality, performance or durability of the product. Worse, it steals time and energy away from your designers’ innovation and product differentiation efforts.
Siemens Digital Industries Solutions shatters the silos between design teams, enabling a true multidisciplinary design process.
Teams can still work in parallel, but are no longer isolated or blind to what the other design teams are doing. And more importantly each team gets a full, multi-layered view of how other teams’ designs and changes are impacting their work, in real time.
Problems can be immediately identified and resolved earlier and more easily before complex interdependency issues compound.
Every member of every team has easy, continuous access to all current designs, information and product-related data across all other teams. Everyone can move forward faster and innovate with confidence, accelerating product development while reducing risk and costs.
“Parallel, but integrated—with full visibility.” That’s the digitally transformed design world Siemens Digital Industries Software enables.
Just because data is digitized and available across product teams doesn’t mean it’s accessible or integrated in a way that’s readily useful or meaningful to teams that didn’t create the data. And that’s a huge problem when designing electronic systems of any complexity, creating constant design spins between disciplines due to lack of process integration.
Many organizations today are forced to endure lengthy development cycles caused by manual processes and requirements—inefficiencies often resulting from data incompatibilities between processes and teams that require time-consuming manual effort and data translations just to make the data useful across teams. Each team uses different software and data formats, so the time it takes to convert and generate meaningful cross-discipline data grinds progress and productivity to a halt, while causing great frustration among team members.
Organizations need an integrated approach to design management that combines mechanical, electronics, software and simulation data into a unified collaborative environment.
Standardized data handling means higher engineering quality, less labor commitment, and shorter project runtimes. It does, however, also demand standardized interfaces.
But what if you could eliminate the significant bottleneck, frustration and effort to ensure everyone has an accurate, real-time, 360-degree picture of all data? What if instead of spending over a quarter of your development time resolving data integrity issues, your teams could spend that time on product innovation—delivering greater functionality and performance to your customers while reducing costs, weight and power requirements?
The Siemens Digital Industries Software suite of NX, Teamcenter, Xpedition and Capital, provides a true, digitally-integrated solution enabling efficient, multi-domain access to data, greatly streamlining the entire product development process. No more manual conversion or translation steps required. Everyone gets a current, common view of data across all aspects of a product’s design, empowering teams to collaborate more efficiently, while accelerating and simplifying digital handoffs and prototyping.
Products get to market faster. Teams can spend more time on differentiating features and capabilities and less dealing with the valueless friction caused by cross-organizational data bottlenecks. Better products. Less cost. And happier, more productive teams.
Digital transformation isn’t just about digitized data. It’s about seamless, real-time, anytime access to all data, providing a common, comprehensive view of your product to everyone and fueling unprecedented innovation.
The electronics industry is constantly striving to expedite the design process. Lack of knowledge and prior design experience are primary contributors in increasing design time and costs.
Product teams need more intelligence and insight, sooner, in order to design, engineer, validate and manufacturer products better and faster. Unfortunately, traditional design processes—using disparate tools across teams and stages—can’t analyze and identify issues destined to create downstream problems.
Streamlining the transition from design to manufacturing requires a complete and shared understanding of the product, its variability and early downstream access to the data—to identify problems before they occur. This improves system-level integration and requirements transfer and exposes valuable metrics to derive actionable intelligence.
So, how can you get products to market faster, with higher quality and reduced risk? By optimizing decisions and taking corrective action sooner rather than later. System architecture integration and prescriptive analytics enable electronics manufacturers to adopt an integrated, system-driven approach to product development.
Prescriptive analytics—and the intelligence it provides for future time savings—requires a tightly integrated and unified multi-domain and multi-discipline platform that facilitates collaboration across domains and supply chains. This integration enables continuous, real-time access to data analytics that can drive optimization and provide instant status, resulting in fewer corrective engineering change orders (ECOs).
The Siemens Digital Industries Software suite is built around multi-domain digital integration, providing common definition of variability throughout the lifecycle.
Whether products are simpler and delivered with a defined set of supported variants…or more complex, with an exponential number of possible variations and combinations…or engineered to order, continually requiring new variants of parts and designs—organizations can ensure everyone has the right information and knowledge they need.
By connecting the digital twin and improving intelligence throughout the process, the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio provides real-time decision optimization.
Issues can be identified and resolved earlier and more easily, enabling manufacturers to accelerate time to market and spend more time on product differentiation rather than problem resolution—all while reducing risk and costs.
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