5 Reasons You Should Use ThingWorx Building Blocks

For the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to work in the most efficient and cost-effective manner, IIoT solutions need a foundation of specialized modular components in their IoT architecture, aka Building Blocks, that can be easily customized to meet changing business needs. ThingWorx Building Blocks not only improve the solution’s lifecycle management but also create organized content for increased solution lifetime. The flexibility and convenience of Building Blocks are only the beginning of why you should be using them, here are five more:

1. No need to build from scratch on ThingWorx.

It is no secret that leveraging the ThingWorx IIoT Solutions Platform significantly improves the success rate to bring solutions to market as compared to those that are self-initiated. ThingWorx is committed to further reducing the costs of IIoT solution development with Building Blocks. PTC has developed components within the IoT architecture to act as a foundation for building solutions on ThingWorx. Whether it is improving production efficiency  in a manufacturing plant or monitoring hundreds of thousands of assets around the world, Building Blocks provide a massive head start to building IIoT solutions while avoiding the need to re-invent the wheel. Solution developers can now build knowing their end-solution is reusable, repeatable, and scalable.

2, Accelerate your IIoT solution development and get to value faster.

Building Blocks are ready-to-configure components that each solve a unique business problem for industrial companies. They also provide the flexibility to reuse and extend underlying functionality. They can be tailored to your distinctive use cases without having to modify it completely. Their reusability and adaptability drastically reduce the time and cost of unnecessary custom development. With them, our teams have seen over 75% reduction in implementation time.

3. Leverage the domain expertise from thousands of Industrial IoT solutions.

PTC has gathered years of domain expertise while building IIoT solutions on a proven IoT architecture and working closely with our partners and customers to deliver significant financial impact by bringing great and unique IIoT solutions to market using the ThingWorx IIoT Solutions Platform. Needless to say, we've learned a lot, and as a result, ThingWorx continues to be a leader in the IIoT market. ThingWorx continues to provide this domain expertise in the form of end-to-end building blocks. For example – a ‘Shift’ building block provides the solution User Interface (UI) to configure and manage shifts in a factory, the business and domain logic specific to the manufacturing domain, and the required connectors to get the shifts data from an existing enterprise system. Such stand-alone components inclusive of the domain knowledge are ready for you to integrate into your next IIoT solution.

4. Future proof your solutions.

As industrial companies mature in their digital transformation journey, the desire to tackle more complex use cases becomes especially important. A poorly designed and architected IIoT solution can potentially slow down digital transformation momentum. Building Blocks allow you to go long-term with scalable, repeatable, and upgradable components. They can be replaced with little effort and without having to re-architect the entire solution.

5. PTC has your back.

PTC’s upcoming latest generation of enterprise-grade solutions, such as Digital Performance Management, is built using the same building blocks and the IoT architecture that will be available to the ThingWorx ecosystem. By utilizing Building Blocks, you are aligning your IIoT solution’s design pattern with PTC solutions, and therefore will naturally be supported for years to come. Lastly, PTC’s building block framework is the most tested and validated development pattern on the ThingWorx platform. Building Blocks are being used in real production deployments by large industrial companies to accelerate their digital transformation journey!

Final Thoughts

Utilizing Building Blocks not only simplifies the process to build your solutions by allowing you to assemble them, but also provides the agility to modify your solutions quickly as your needs evolve, empowering you to focus on your business goals. With an increased demand to be ahead of the competition, utilizing Building Blocks will continue to propel rapid digital transformation.