Overview: How Polaris is driving a connected enterprise with a digital thread
Polaris strives to create a great end-to-end experience for its customers, including customized purchase options, enhanced safety features, and rapid product repair. To achieve this vision, it needed to connect stakeholders across the company with real-time, accurate product data. With that in mind, the manufacturer adopted a step-by-step approach to digital transformation, unlocking the power of its employees through PTC solutions. At the heart of this transformation was Windchill, PTC’s PLM solution.
The results to date have been significant:
Productivity
Costs
Product repair
Safety and reliability
Operational efficiency
Innovation
Data quality and accuracy
Time to market
Challenges: Outgrowing processes and tools
As the global leader in powersports, Polaris, Inc. operates 30 brands and delivers enriching experiences and services that invite people to discover the joy of being outdoors. As the company has experienced tremendous growth over the past decade—and established a larger global footprint—it had outgrown its processes and tools. As a result, it was struggling to deal with the complexity of all the product options and variants.
To mass customize its line of snowmobiles and ATVs as well as quickly deliver the most innovative, high-quality vehicles in the market, Polaris needed to better connect and manage every step of its product lifecycle. The challenge was to equip its employees with the right tools so the company could continually stay ahead of customer expectations while empowering riders with the right products, services, and experiences.
Solution: Establishing a PLM-enabled digital thread
Polaris called upon PTC’s enterprise PLM solution, Windchill, to streamline the product development process, resulting in efficiencies and improved innovation across the enterprise. The many capabilities of Windchill empower the company to manage and orchestrate a digital thread of data across the enterprise. Windchill makes it possible to react better and faster to customer- and engineering-driven changes, optimize costs, and break down the silos between engineering, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and service with closed loop quality.
This digital thread also extends into augmented reality (AR). Windchill’s AR Design Share functionality provides an efficient way to collect, create, manage, and maintain 3D experiences as part of the natural PLM process in a more consumable way.
The connectivity of Windchill paired with the collaborative aspect of ThingWorx has brought all areas of Polaris’ product development processes onto one platform.
PTC ThingWorx Navigate provides secure, quick, and easy access to rich product development data managed in Windchill through a set of contextual role- or task-based apps. Non-expert and expert users alike spend less time searching for data and see the data they need—combined with data managed in other systems such as ERP—in a simplified, easy-to-understand interface.
- BOM Management
- Configuration Management
- BOM Transformation
- Change Management
- Manufacturing Process Management
Implementation: Enabling the connected enterprise
Polaris wants to inspire consumers to choose the company’s brands based on connections made with its customized vehicles. To enable this, Polaris embarked on a digital transformation journey. The focus was on implementing and providing the processes, communications, and data that its employees could harness to best design, introduce, produce, and support innovative products.
PLM Demonstrations
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