Transforming Product Lifecycle Management at Infineon

00:03 My name is Ron Cramer. I'm the Project Manager for the product lifecycle management introduction at Infineon Technologies. And my role is making sure that we are introducing product lifecycle management to, at the end, leverage the benefits we're expecting like more efficiency, less errors, and bringing more innovation to our customers. I've been working in many different areas across Infineon. I've been working in operations. I've been working in development. I've been working in corporate quality, and I've been also working in a lot of interface functions over the time.

00:36 And what I found out was one of the biggest struggles we always had was finding information, finding data, knowing which data to rely upon. We have had big initiatives trying to improve yields, doing other things, finding problems. And then, we lost time because we could not find information. We couldn't rely on information. The way we are looking at it is you need a source of truth. In the past we've been talking a lot about a single source of truth.

01:06 But what we have found is when we say a single source of truth, people believe that all of the data must be stored in the PLM system. But when you look at it, and I think that's also similar across multiple industries, typically your data is distributed. And you don't necessarily want to pull everything in because at some point you would have to worry about bandwidth limitations. You also have very, different systems. And what we're trying to achieve with PLM is to orchestrate the whole thing. So really like a directory service, if you're looking for something

01:40 belonging to this product. And for that purpose, of course, the product structures need to be represented in PLM. The requirements to this product can be found in this system. So providing the link to the data including full configuration and change management and enabling traceability. If you look at the development process, I would call it the happy path. Right? You're starting off, you're talking to the customer. You're talking to the customers. You know what you want to do. You start to build it, and then you just sail through.

02:11 But then reality happens. Typically, markets change. Customer needs change. Some materials, some components might no longer be available. Prices go up, prices go down. There's changes all over the place. And this is really the big challenge you have. How do you manage those changes over the course of the lifetime of a product? And this is where we're looking for a solution like PLM. Decarbonization is a big topic for Infineon. So Infineon is a lot about digitalization and decarbonization

02:44 decarbonization for us is a big market driver. It's a huge opportunity because there's a lot of, carbon reduction you can achieve through semiconductors. So think about another megatrend. Data centers and AI. There's a lot of compute power. So there's also a lot of electrical energy being needed to run those servers. And there's a lot of energy being needed to get the heat back out of those data centers. Now think about semiconductor solutions.

03:14 And Infineon is a leader in power semiconductors and through new technologies like gallium nitride and silicon carbide, you can bring down the efficiency and delivering energy to those services by just a tiny percentage. But knowing that those data centers have power consumption comparable to small countries, At the end, there's a big return. And we believe this is one of our contributions to sustainability. Another big megatrend is electrification.

03:44 So talking about electric vehicles. That's a big market. But it's not just the electric vehicles, which is changing dramatically, The whole supply chain is in the automotive industry Big opportunity for Infineon because the semiconductor content in those cars goes up dramatically. But it's not just personal vehicles, There's also a lot of electrification going on in construction equipment, in agricultural equipment. not just for energy efficiency, but also for, bringing more power to those vehicles.

04:15 From the conception of the product, you have to have efficiency, you have to have sustainability, in mind. So digitalization for me means much more than just moving from paper to Excel. Actually it's more moving away from Excel, to integrating data sources. So it's really building the foundation to be able to connect data, organizing the data, structuring the data, standardizing the data, because then you can make those connections,

04:47 And you can start to retrieve information from it. If you don't do the heavy lifting, if you don't do the groundwork, if you don't organize your data, if you don't curate the data, basically you don't have training data and you will not be able to then, get the benefits of from techniques, like artificial intelligence. Our products are growing more and more in complexity. So especially when we go into the systems, we have microcontrollers running software on them, we have sensors, we have power semiconductors

05:19 and so on and so forth. Bringing all of this together, you need a strong backbone. By having a unified approach to manage the data, it really helps those teams to exchange information much faster. The reason why we chose PTC is, and it has been confirmed over the years of our collaboration, is the DNA of the companies, they really fit together nicely. Both have sustainability in our hearts and, there's a lot of innovation,

05:51 there's a lot of big picture thinking, there's a lot of digitalization going on. And what we definitely like about PTC is the open approach. PTC is offering solutions for the whole lifecycle, from conception to service ability, but you're not forced to use all of those solutions. So the way PTC products are being set up, it really allows us to bring in, for example, Windchill, now into our company and to connect it with systems we already have and also to connect it with systems

06:21 we have. Windchill, for example, did not even yet have out of the box interfaces. What we also like a lot is this looking forward, this strategic thinking, Also the systems, thinking "what do you need to have the whole solution And how does knowing about the whole solution help to design better products?" and this is where We have two companies fit together very nicely.