Digital Transformation: A Journey Not a Destination

00:00 It's good to see you all. When I accepted the present, I didn't know I was going to be the keynote speaker. So I get to have the privilege of kicking you all off to the event, since obviously this day's content starts before the actual start of the event. But no. Welcome, everybody. It's good to see all your faces. So my name is Eric Horn. I'm the essentially the IT enterprise architect at Microengine, which is a division of Terumo Americas, probably a health or med device company you probably haven't heard of.

00:31 But we are a medical industry. And I'll be kind of walking through a little bit about what we are when we get to subsequent slides. But I'm essentially going to be walking you through a little bit about digital transformation and digital thread and what all that means. I know you've all probably heard the buzzwords quite a bit, and I know especially for me, I'm a solution and enterprise architect and it's even a struggle for me. Like, what do these buzzwords mean? What does it really mean to our business and how are we going to put this into practice?

01:01 So I'm going to kind of walk you through a little bit on what digital transformation is. And so maybe we should talk about real quick, just maybe even what's the definition of digital transformation? And so here’s a real quick, you know, hey, definition of what is digital transformation? So you can just see here, it's really just the adoption of digital technology. But then what happens when I put that into practice. So ideally what this means is a multi year journey that companies go through. And it usually in my case, from what I've seen,

01:32 it's not usually a multi year one project is typically multi year and I've transformed digital processes probably for more than a decade through different corporations and initiatives. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to address the fundamentals of business transformation, not just in technology, but also the business processes that we're touching. And of course, in this process we're going to establish the digital thread and evolve it over time. Then the next thing is, is okay, so what's the digital thread?

02:02 Here's just a snapshot of what we're going to be going into and then the definition behind it. So this definition gets a little bit more involved, but really it's just a data driven architecture about how we connect our systems together and the processes that then support that data. So what's the practice of that? Is establishing a system of truth, because we can't have a digital thread if we don't know which system actually owns the data. So that should hopefully be part of any digital thread architecture. We want to create interfaces.

02:33 Obviously this digital thread is really just talking about how data is interwoven together across these systems and of course establishing rules then enforce that system of truth is very important and we want to then add upon data as it progresses down the downstream. And so a lot of that is, is, you know, Windchill is the start of, for a lot of people the start of the thread ERP, maybe in the middle there somewhere.

03:03 ERP then adds additional value to that as it adds the supply chain and manufacturing information. All right. So with that quick intro to kind of set the stage, so to say what are we going? What am I going to be talking about today? So I just really have a really short 30 minutes to kind of get through this topic. So we'll just be kind of skimming the surface on a lot of this. And also just save your questions for the end. We'll get to you. I'll promise to leave a little bit of time. And then when we do get to the questions, I'll want you to use the mics because we are recording this.

03:33 And so I want to make sure that people will get your questions on part of the recording. All right. So we're going to walk you through a little bit just real quick about Micro Vention, kind of our digital transformation history that we're going through right now, kind of the steps we've taken to get there so far, what that digital thread looks like, what the roadmap looks like. And then I'm also going to give you guys a call to action as far as what you can do to then establish this at your companies. So micro vention, we're actually make really small devices and

04:05 so these devices go inside your veins. And what we actually focus on is neurovascular diseases, especially around stroke and other things that go on in your brain. And so they're coils that go in there to help improve your blood flow, some other coils that then go in there to actually fill the void of that aneurysm and seal it off. And one of the things I was reading about what's unique about Micro vention is we can actually be one of the only companies that can seal a ruptured aneurysm, which is actually pretty cool.

04:36 If any of you have been in in have had these kind of therapies before. I don't know if you're a stroke survivor. Congratulations for surviving that. But that's part of our vision. Our part of our mission is to cure people from those stroke events. And then, of course, there's all kinds of products that go around. How do you deliver those different devices to portions of the body? Of course I'm an IT guy. Read this. Don't listen to me.

05:08 All right. So now I'm going to get into a little bit about our transformation history and kind of where we've gotten how we've gotten to where we are today. So the first thing is, is that the company was based around a kind of a paper based approach to how we do things. It's was a company was established, I believe , in the 80s, very small company, and they started off a lot of things on paper and especially being in a regulated industry, doing paper trails of a lot of things is very important here. You can see there's a lot of paper that's being produced

05:38 and not too long ago we had these red envelopes and so it was kind of one of those things to go through an approval process. Documents kind of went into this red envelope, was passed around from desk to desk, and people when they saw a red envelope on their desk would sign the paperwork, whatever review, whatever they needed to review and then pass it on. And it was kind of like, you know, playing hot potato. So as you're playing hot potato, when you get that red envelope, people quickly wanted to sign it and get it off their desk into the next one.

06:08 Then eventually. And also that was not really that long ago. That was like years ago. Not like decades ago. And then we kind of get into this document centric approach where now we're saying, okay, we need to have some sort of control in the system. We're going to start taking these electronic documents. Now they're going to move from paper to kind of electronic and then say, okay, we're going to store those in zip files, especially when it came to CAD. So CAD, they were still storing things as zip files. And of course, a SolidWorks house.

06:39 We don't use Creo, but they were then taking SolidWorks. They'd compress that to a zip file and then attach that to a document in Etq. Etcd is kind of a document management system that is prevalent in the med device world and helps with. It also has other quality tools for CMS. And so then they were storing that in Etq and that was kind of their vault repository. So okay, so that was good. But then we're like, okay, we still need to do better.

07:10 So then looked at a way of how do we now integrate SolidWorks with a system like Windchill? I was not around when they picked Windchill, so I don't really have the fundamental knowledge of the use cases that went into having SolidWorks and going with Windchill. But Windchill is a leading tool in this in this space, especially a lot of med device companies that are competition obviously use Windchill and some of you may be my competition in the room. So now we're sewing SolidWorks data using the workgroup manager

07:42 and submitting that into Windchill to store it in there as the CAD repository. So step one in establishing the digital thread was getting a system in place for CAD data. And of course this was the original purpose behind bringing Windchill in was actually as a CAD repository. And then as they're starting to look at integrating SolidWorks with the system, they're like, Hey, we have a lot of additional capabilities that we can use in here other than just storing it, the CAD tool. So quite quickly, step one went to step two and said,

08:15 we need to add scope and we need to look at these additional modules. And so we went from not just doing CAD data management where quickly let's do material and bond management. So we want to use those parts. And then now we're going to want to use those for doing the bill's material. But then also we can now use NPM link and do process plans. So they solved a lot of this vision of how can I use this system to supply additional information that I'm currently controlling in Word or Excel today? So all the documents was handled in Etq.

08:49 They wanted to take all the documents from Etq and now also put those in Windchill and have all of doc control control their documentation within Windchill as well. Then that way then you have one system that engineering and documents are all in inside the system itself. And then last but not least, we built an integration with SAP. So now that material Master and Bill material information that is being controlled and released in Windchill can now get published to SAP and then that was the the first step towards that digital thread. All right. So this is just a.

09:23 This is actually a pretty simple digital thread example, but that's because there's not really too many interfaces yet. And I kind of left off a little bit about some of the systems that kind of just pulled data out. So there are some additional systems that are in here that actually have just use rest surfaces just to grab some data. But the big thing here is Windchill is connected to SAP, and then that has direct interface that now will publish as we release the ECN in Windchill. It will now push that information into SAP.

09:55 The one thing that's unique about Micro Vention is we're at least the first one I've seen that has integrated with SAP MDG. Instead of just publishing parts and Bom directly to SAP, it all goes in the part Masters first go to MDG to go through its change process, get approved, release, get additional attributes added to it, and then once that's released and pushed to SAP, then SAP asks Windchill, Hey, I just got this material, Master, can I please have its bill of material? And then the Bom is then pushed into SAP. So it's kind of a two step approach.

10:30 The biggest thing about that is that time lag between when I publish the Material Master and when I get the bill material in SAP can be weeks if not months. So some of you who have maybe built integrations from Windchill to an ERP system, like why does it take you months to get a bomb in there? Well, we won't get into that today, but you can come ask me later. All right. So now all this work, you can see all those different modules we started looking at. And remember, this is not we're not an extremely big company.

11:00 We're not like, you know, billions and billions of dollars. We're like a $500 million a year company, a few thousand employees. There's a lot of stuff that was done all at one time, probably over the span of like a year and a half to two years. So, okay, so now we jammed all that technology in, started using all this. But I think there's a lot of inefficiencies. And I don't think I know there's a lot of inefficiencies. So now we're doing a remediation project to say, how can we address those?

11:30 How do we overcome a lot of the training hurdles? So not only is training kind of already difficult when you're face to face, but this goal was during Covid, and so they went live when you couldn't meet face to face for training. There was some in-person hand-holding and in training in-person, but it wasn't anything like I'm used to before Covid, where you can have bring huge people like like all of you together and say, hey, let's all go through some training and best practices and let's hold ad hoc meetings.

12:03 Now, a lot of this is being done over teams and online meetings, which as you know, is very efficient. Right? And everybody listens , right? What so so there's a lot of things that are overcome. So there's a lot of people problems that we're trying to address with this, too. So there's steep learning curves and learning a lot of these modules already. Well, how can we help address some of these learning curves? And then there's a lot of process things. So we have a lot of business processes that are going on in the system that were done.

12:37 Essentially they took a lot of the old paper based process or document centric processes and brought those into Windchill. Now, if any of you have done those kind of steps before, you know that if you try to put a document centric process into Windchill and now you're trying to make the W-2 part the center of the universe, but it's not the center of the universe, and we're using these old processes. Well, things don't always orchestrate as well as you'd like them to. So yeah, overcoming that those hurdles is, is definitely what we're trying to resolve.

13:10 And of course there's a whole lot of process bottlenecks in there too. So part of that process bottleneck was also part of the people process that we're trying to evolve as well. They're saying like, Hey, the users aren't learning, so and they're really struggling and maybe we're having quality defects on release that aren't me that either are being caught or are not being caught. How are we going to help control the chaos? So they brought in the centralized team and said, Hey, you guys are the experts. We're going to make you guys the gatekeepers for everything.

13:40 So all CAD data changes done by like 2 to 300 engineers go through a group of six, and that group of six will check, validate and sometimes even do the work for those group of engineers. All right. Now, we also have a lot of technology issues and a lot of these technology issues aren't necessarily windchill's fault, especially because the original system integrator maybe implemented something a little bit incorrectly in the system. So we had like data integrity issues and some of

14:10 the data integrity issues were either due to the data that was translated from Aetc into Windchill, or maybe there was a robot in the ECM process that was doing something it wasn't supposed to like. There was a step in the ECM process that said , okay, you got to release it, set everything to released. But then there was still these these post we call them post implementation tasks that happened after the fact. Well, what happened was, is if Doc Control hit cancel and ended up canceling the ECN, it took all that release data and put it back in work and we're like, No.

14:46 So we had to go back and fix that and remove that robot and said, If you cancel an ECN after it's released, you're not allowed to touch the release documentation. Sure you can. So Doc Control came up with a process for that. And so Doc Control now has the keys to the kingdom. If I cancel it, this is the way I do it to make sure that the data is right. And that's just one example of many. But a lot of this also came down to the fundamental of taking that paper based process and putting it into Windchill. All right. So and then as we're going through this remediation process,

15:18 we're also taking a look at what's the long term vision. So we're here, we're using a lot of these tools, but how do we really evolve and take advantage of this long term? And some of this isn't, you know, like it's like when you're trying to build something, do you ever do like the foundation first and worry about the framing later? No, no. What we want to do is as we're essentially we're rebuilding the foundation right now, we want to make sure that we're looking ahead to say, well, what do we want to do in the near term, the long term and even the longer term.

15:50 So it's kind of like, what's this plan look like? How does it fit into like a multi generational plan and what's going to come next? Because as long as we kind of come up with that roadmap, we can plan for the next step and then the step after that. And then what happens if a business has other priorities that are going on with the business? We can look at those business priorities and say, well, is there anything I can do today that will help take advantage of where we want to go next year or the year after?

16:22 So yeah, it's coming up with a strategy for that, and especially when it comes to technology gaps because yes, we do still have a lot of technology gaps. Windchill while it can do a lot. There's a lot of different modules we can take advantage of. That's there's a lot of other things that we do at the company too, that maybe, hey, we really need to come up with a way with fulfilling these gaps. And now, of course, all of our key business processes. What are these keys? Business processes. So we have R&D up there. So R&D likes to do a lot of exploratory projects.

16:52 Well, how can we do better at the MPI effort up front? That's like its whole vehicle itself. How do we do operations manufacturing? Well, we have a plant that's local and we're in Southern California, in Orange County. So we have a local plant there that does manufacturing, but it only does about 20% of our manufacturing. The other 80% is being done in Costa Rica. Well, what happens when we transfer production from Orange County to Costa Rica? Well, there's a whole process there that we can definitely improve upon,

17:24 especially dealing now. We have a lot of documents in English and in Spanish to support that. We got regulatory and quality in labeling too. So regulatory quality and labeling are kind of key for med device industry. And so regulatory obviously for doing regulatory submissions, making sure that we're allowed to sell these devices into these different countries. Of course, the US, it's the FDA quality is always making sure that everything's being done according to their standards and then labeling.

17:54 Of course, every med device has to be labeled in a certain way by these regulatory agencies and we want to make sure that they're in the loop and get their processes going. All right, so what's the digital thread future kind of look like? So near-term, we want to look at implementing Mas. So Camstar is known in the med device industry. We have a Terumo facility that is using Camstar, and so we're kind of looking at that.

18:24 How do we integrate that within our business model so that now we can do orchestration between Windchill, SAP and Camstar? So, you know, Windchill is going to be the source of truth for the engineering, the part, the building material, the process plans, process plans being key Right now. Those have a lot of customizations that we made around taking that process plan and then outputting that right to an Excel. Kind of not the best thing we can go this nice digital product process planning to

18:54 essentially to print a piece of paper while we essentially got it ready to get to integration but isn't quite there yet. And then of course once that is now in SAP can orchestrate with it by opening up production orders and actually now capturing the as built condition because obviously with the med device, we have to capture a lot of serial numbers, lot numbers. There's labels and barcodes that we have to scan. So Mas will then capture all of that. So now we look at the roadmap.

19:24 So this is kind of a very high level roadmap. We're still in kind of the first phase zero, but at least we're also starting to plan for that phase one. And phase one has Mas in there and a bunch of other things. So notice how we didn't put years on this because we could make a roadmap that says this year we're going to do this, next year we're going to do that. But that was almost two. I guess, too rigid. We kind of need to come up with a more structured approach to say, how can we look at what's upcoming priorities without necessarily committing to

19:56 a time frame? This was kind of the way we broke that down. And then you can see there's a lot of different functionalities when you look in here, and some of it may be foreign to you if you're not in the medical industry. I know it was foreign to me, especially learning what the DfE and DMR is, but that's all very specific documentation that's related to your devices and its history and all that formal records. So you can just kind of take a look at that and kind of what really what it comes down to is building this kind of roadmap is essential because this is not a one year project.

20:26 Most of these are multi-year projects in themselves. And so kind of coming up with this roadmap is like, I need a strategy for how I'm going to approach these problems. Because when an executive comes to me and says, What are you working on and what should we be working on? Well, we take a look at well, here's a lot of things that we have to work on as a company. What's a priority to you? You know, Mr. VP or Mr. President or Mrs. President and saying, you know what, what is important because we have to adjust that strategy as we go along.

20:59 So now I'm just going to break it down just a little bit into just some bullet points. So as far as digital transformation goes, I usually say implementing new technology is very easy. A lot of you may laugh at that because it's really not that easy. But in comparison to a lot of things, new technology is simple. Evolving your business process to effectively use that technology is very difficult, but it's also essential. So when you get these new technologies in,

21:29 you need to look at your key business process and say, How can I use this? Or how can I evolve this process with the technology I'm implementing? Because trust me, there's a lot of organizational change that has to go along with it. And organizational change is some of the most difficult things you'll do at a company. And I'm going through a lot of that right now. And and yeah, it is difficult because there's always resistance to change. And of course I always say you want to manage the productivity, the productivity dip of that change.

21:59 So if you've never heard of the productivity dip, every time I do business or process change, there's always a dip in productivity as people are adjusting to that change. And then what happens is, is that as you try to overcome that, whether that's a training or an adoption problem is I don't want to introduce another productivity dip to react to the productivity tip I just got. And a key example is that is like like what we did is people are struggling to learn the system and they're causing errors.

22:30 Well, we say, well, instead of trying to push through that training effort, we make a bottleneck in the process and say we're going to have a centralized team do the work, or at least check all the work of these hundreds of engineers. Well, that's another that introduces another productivity dip. And in fact, it was even worse than that. It became a bottleneck, a process bottleneck. And so as the company is saying, hey, how do I scale from a $500 million a year company to I want to be over $1 billion a year in revenue in, say, X number of years

23:02 Well, you're not going to do it by funneling all of your engineering work through six people. Even if I doubled their capacity and say, let's get 12 people, is that still the kind of productivity gains we need? No, it's not. So now we have to say, well, how can we remove this bottleneck? And of course you want to communicate early and often. And communication is always difficult because the way we consume information varies by person. And how often do you read all the emails that come in to you today?

23:32 How many people here get too many emails? Yeah, I get hundreds. Do you think I read them all? My favorite thing is hitting control. A archive. So, yeah. And then, of course, we need the right business partners. And also, I want to say not just the right business partners within the company, but you want to educate and get the C levels if you need the C level backing up on these issues because they will help you overcome those hurdles as you get to them.

24:03 And then when it comes to the digital thread, we want to avoid duplication of work and duplication of entry. So when you're putting these systems in place, you want to say, if I'm putting parts in Bom in Windchill, do not be also typing in parts and Bom information in your ERP system. It always surprised me because I did a lot of work. I've been I was at like solar turbines for ten years and they were early adopters of connecting ERP. And when I got to talk to other companies,

24:33 I was really surprised how few people connected their ERP system. And I'm like, So you do all this work and Windchill and then you just go redo this in ERP. How do you know it's right? And then what happens is too is they're doing Bom transformation in the middle of it. So engineering's releasing the Bom and then they hand that over to somebody in planning or supply chain and then they look at that. I'm like, Well, I can't buy that, but I can buy these. And then they input the Bom into ERP manually. And what they're doing is they're doing that Bom transformation in their head by putting

25:06 it into ERP. And of course, you want to use appropriate technology based on the process or the system that you currently own. So direct integrations based on a trigger in your system? Very important. Like us, we have the CDN. That's our vehicle. When the ECM reaches a certain state, it automatically publishes to SAP. Nobody has to go in there and hit release. Somebody kind of does. But I won't tell you about that. And then, of course, Web services are really good.

25:38 So how many people are using rest services? It's a lot more than I've seen in the past. So rest service is very powerful. Good way of your exterior systems to interface and pull information out. So like we're using a regulatory system called Rim, and every now and then they want to query Windchill and say, Hey, I have Rev D of this document in Rim CIS and I want to see somebody else release a new version of it. And as a simple query that sends the document number

26:08 and then Windchill will tell it what is the latest revision. So that way I can see if anything's out of date. All right. So what's your call to action? One making a roadmap. So how many people have a roadmap? Actually, that's a lot more than I think. So I actually also am the chair for PTC user for smart manufacturing. And when I asked that in my tech committee, I had nobody. So either they didn't know a roadmap was there or maybe their company didn't.

26:38 So for those of you who do have a roadmap, thank you. To is to get executive buy in. So a lot of people tend to make decisions and make roadmaps, but don't get buy in from your executives. Having your executive in the know of your roadmap and supporting your roadmap is very important and is very value added effort to get that approval from them. Now educating them is one thing. So I spent a lot of time educating higher levels and they still struggle with this.

27:08 They have the the want to know and the struggle is is well how much information I'm very I can get very technical and I'm like how much information do I need to give them so that they feel like they know something. But I don't also make them feel like, you know, they're stupid essentially, because they're not they're just not technical like me. And so trying to get that buy in the right level of education is very important. And then, of course, you want to communicate, and that's communicating up to the executive level, obviously, and communicating down to everybody else. That's stakeholders, users, whatever.

27:41 Communication is very important. And then of course, you want to be flexible because plans do change. So as you're looking at your roadmap, you may say, sure, Ms. may be very important for us for the next step. But what may happen is, is we could get some all of a sudden red alert, like saying, hey, maybe changing our regulatory system is detrimental to doing the next six months. Well, we have to be flexible to say, well, how does that fit into the picture? How am I going to do that? And what is going to be the ramifications if I take

28:12 on this new project? And then what's going to happen to the mayor's initiative? So having that roadmap helps us adapt to change and also helps us adapt to the impact of change as it comes along. All right. How many people feel like this was drinking from the fire hose on the first meeting ? All right. But that was it. So now's your time. We have a few minutes for questions, actually , one minute. And if you do have a question, I ask you to come up for the microphone so that you can be heard on the recording.

28:45 So you're on the right. Yeah. So is this on? Yeah. Okay. So, um, are you doing pushes out of Windchill or are you pulling data from your other systems from Windchill? So yeah, we're doing both. So the published SAP is a push. The other systems are pulling using rest. Met advice is largely SolidWorks driven and CAD systems. Can you add some color as to how easy that transformation was to get people using Creo?

29:18 We're not using Creo. Oh, okay. So we're still 100% SolidWorks. Is there any desire to go to Creo or No, you guys are going to stick with it so far? No, no desire to change. Okay. Thank you. Yep. So that just shows the power of the workgroup manager. So right now it works pretty good with SolidWorks, not as good as Creo, but we are using it quite effectively. Any other questions? No. Easy. Okay, one more. So you push data down from Windchill into SAP,

29:50 but which is kind of that that digital thread. But does it come back into Windchill as in this is what I produced, this is what I manufactured. Here's the serialized instance instances and then the ability to kind of continue to track that. Good question. So no, we don't take it so we don't take any as built condition in Windchill. So we're not also the system of record of serialization and units that have been produced. We keep all that information in SAP.

30:20 So that's usually key. If you have a service organization that then wants to use that serialized information down the road. Unfortunately, with coils in your brain, we're not going to do service on it. So then kind of the follow up with that is that how do you so you have requirements. Those requirements were designed in, in R in Windchill How do you now know that you've fulfilled those requirements? Good question. So we're not using requirements management yet. In fact, if you if you studied the roadmap at all,

30:52 you'll see that our roadmap actually has requirements to many animation requirements. Management is planned for some time in the future. Right now, it's all being tracked in word documents, so somebody has to go in and validate those requirements are being met as that product is maturing. You're next. When you select technology partners in your digital ecosystem, what characteristics do you look for for selecting that partner or the tool that they are selling?

31:23 So I assume you mean technology partners and technology partners? Windchill Right. You chose Windchill. There are other options. Camstar was another option, right? I mean, what do you look for? Unfortunately, I wasn't there when we did these major selections, so I actually can't honestly answer that question. But yeah, so yeah, any question I give you is just going to be hypothetical. So I'll say I don't know. Okay. All right. Okay. So one of the challenges in having Windchill and SAP is change management, right?

31:56 So are you working with SAP to improve that in any shape or form? Because our company uses both, and that's one of the areas where we see a weakness. So yeah, and change management I guess is difficult with SAP because it really depends on the capacity you're doing. Change management in SAP right now. Since when we published the ECN from Windchill, it essentially creates a new change within SAP, and then they use that change vehicle. It's actually an MDG that they're doing that and then they'll use that to then add value and approve and release an SAP.

32:31 We could probably do a much better job. Right now, essentially Windchill is providing the start of that process in SAP. But there's no communication, there's no need for any communication back, and I'm sure we could do a much better job at it. But right now it's like we're just doing it as basic as we can to fulfill the minimum requirements that we need to for the med device industry. Thank you. So great presentation. How do you guys track the defects?

33:04 Track the difference. Defects. Or defects. So that's all being handled in Etq. So we are not doing any of that in Windchill today. So any. Other tools you are using for defect tracking. Tools? You said? Yeah. So what we're using Etq as our as our defect tracking system now it's only doing the paper fulfillment of the defect tracking. So we're not actually we don't have an actual electronic tool that will do that. So we do all the paperwork with an Etq and then that's where it stays for now.

33:36 Thank you. Yep. So on your roadmap definition, you were speaking about the business value articulation and the need for C-suite sponsorship. So can you give some examples of the value articulation? What are the value value, buckets and hypothesis that you are ideating around now when you are going from technology driven to business driven? Right. And so a lot of the information that we're giving to the executives is,

34:07 first of all, what's what's what is Windchill even responsible for? And it's going over the very high level basics of, hey, what's an E bomb versus an M bomb? And then how are we then making a process plan and then releasing that and building on the shop floor. So it's really just very high level. How is the technology fit into the business processes that we're doing within the company? And then we then show them, okay, talk about how that actually can make a difference. What are the value drivers of those of doing it in a system?

34:37 And then of course, then going through the struggles of what we're doing, like what problems is the company facing because of this and then how can we help overcome it? So it's really trying to tackle it from a high level basic fundamentals, how we're currently doing, what's the value of doing it, and then just trying to come up with use cases of how can we do this better and get their buy in. What system do you store your device history records in? So that's a very good question.

35:08 And I right now, as I know, it's being stored as a document and we currently aren't storing it within Windchill. Okay. Thank you. I saw the RMS system. That's why I was asking. Right, Right, right. Yep. Just a question on terminology, the digital thread. Yes, and learning the meaning of that. And you've explained that really well. I've also heard Digital Twin, right? And I'm trying to figure out if the digital thread is the same thing as the digital twin or if the digital twin doesn't come into this particular case

35:43 or if it's just kind of the same thing. Digital Twin is really its own thing, and it really depends on different use cases. So Digital Twin is like, So now I've developed my cad. Well now is that digital twin? I mean, the CAD is really like the digital twin. And then what do you do with that? Some people say I need to create instances of it because I customize it and I need to know what that looks like over time. You know, for us, our product isn't configurable. You get the device.

36:14 And so we don't really and there's no need for a digital twin because it's implantable that nobody interacts with. But then like use cases, we'll just say tractors. Well, that's very valuable because the digital twin provides me so much knowledge about that device and how I'm using it in the field. Unfortunately, we don't have that same paradigm in our industry, at least in our company. But yeah, they are two separate things. Hi. Great presentation. Thank you.

36:44 One question I had was I saw in one of your diagrams that there is a system with etq. Yes, I'm aware that Windchill also has QMS, and I was curious to understand what made you stick to Etq for the QMS and, you know, not use Windchill. Right. So the real thing is, is so I showed how many modules we implemented in such a short time and we just couldn't afford to bring yet another module into

37:16 the Windchill umbrella just yet. So is there appetite? So that really comes in. So a lot of this adoption of technology takes a big amount of effort. And we just said this is this was actually a lot more than I thought we'd be able to chew at one time. And that was just quality was just not one that we were bringing in yet. But we do have vision to say, do we need to when's the right time? When does it fit into this roadmap? And so that's always something we're going to look towards in the future, just not yet. Thank you.

37:46 All right. Well, we're over time, but I appreciate everybody. Thank you for the questions.