Extending PLM Data Across the Global Enterprise
00:00 Welcome all. My name is Emily Larkin and I'm the Director of Product Management for ThingWorx Navigate. The focus of this session will be on extending PLM data across the global enterprise, a topic that is increasing in relevance for today's workforce. We live in a world today where we are physically separated by geographies, functionally separated across departments, and individually restricted by the systems we have access to. Combine all three of these and something critical to the success of your company, collaboration, quickly becomes the number one challenge impacting time, cost and quality.
00:34 A fundamental goal of digital transformation and the digital thread is better collaboration across the extended enterprise. For discrete manufacturers the foundation of that transformation relies on managing and sharing product data that originates in engineering. After all, the design engineers are authoring the product data for a reason. The product data is a resource for the rest of the enterprise, who must produce the products, sell them, and maintain or service them.
01:05 The design engineers write the recipe, and when any part of the recipe changes, as it will and it should, how do those changes get communicated downstream to the users along the digital thread in purchasing, manufacturing, quality, service, or sales? This exchange of product data is likely happening in numerous ways across your organization today. Maybe it's paper based printouts, pinned at employee workstations, phone calls, or emails to the design engineer, where a manual export is shared.
01:37 Or possibly roles have direct access to where the product data is stored, but users must search across many different tools to find it. It's time to eliminate those barriers to communication and democratize your PLM data securely across your enterprise. ThingWorx Navigate makes it easy to provide collaborators along your value chain with access to online, up to date PLM content in one view through role and task based apps. But you'll find that democratizing your PLM data is just the tipping point.
02:12 Empower and encourage active collaboration across your organization that is bi-directional. Equip your users with PLM data combined with online data from other systems so that their jobs and decisions are supported with all of the relevant information they need in context. With Windchill and ThingWorx Navigate build out the collaboration platform to connect your extended enterprise. ThingWorx Navigate empowers your extended PLM users to make quality decisions and save time with a state of the art user experience.
02:45 Everyone in the organization can see, access, and contribute to PLM processes using one single authoritative source of product data. Navigate is browser based, ensuring that your users have the PLM data they need from their laptop or tablet with any of our supported browsers. There are three distinct ways Navigate can be leveraged. The first is View, a collection of role specific out of the box apps that make it easy to search, access, view
03:15 and download PLM content, including part structures, documents, designs, and drawings in both 2D and 3D. View apps like View Part Structure give users the ability to see key attributes associated with a part or assembly, explore a simplified BOM, and interact with the 3D model, including the ability to see where each part in the structure is highlighted in the model. The 3D model serves as the digital representation of the physical product.
03:46 By tailoring apps by role, you can provide operators, service technicians, purchasing agents, production planners, quality inspectors, and more with secure, read only access to PLM content and help them with their day to day tasks. Our second offering is Contribute. Maybe you started to democratize your product data with View, but you have some roles across the enterprise that need to participate in a PLM process like change management. With Contribute, we provide you standard
04:17 ready to use out of the box apps to unlock active participation by any user in your organization. Today we offer two Contribute apps, My Tasks for reviewing and approving change requests and Report a Problem, which I'll dig into later. The My Tasks app extends the change review process to the right stakeholders across organizations so they can view, comment, approve, reassign, or reject a change. Broadening and simplifying stakeholder engagement can improve change management
04:49 speed, accuracy, and reduce the frequency and impact of unforeseen consequences. In our latest enhancement in Navigate 9.3 we now support electronic signature, managed in Windchill, to ensure regulation compliance and traceability for audits. For regulated industries this new electronic signature support will help you drive faster approvals for critical changes. What if PTC's out of the box apps don't cover the exact use cases you're looking for?
05:21 You have business specific needs or processes that extended PLM participants need to engage in, in order to make them more informed and more productive. The Connected PLM offering provides access to rapid app development, based on the ThingWorx Iot platform, to meet your custom app needs. With Connected PLM, you can customize the out of the box PTC apps or build your own apps unique to your enterprise. With Connected PLM your app builders have access to reusable Navigate components to speed up development time and get your
05:56 apps into the hands of your end users quicker. The components combine visualization with logic and functionality for a consistent look and feel and are designed for upgradability. Let's take a look at an example of the components in action in a custom app for a production planner. Suppose a production planner is searching for a part in their next upcoming batch. This app uses the Item Identity component and Item List component in several
06:26 portions of the app, where it's been configured to display different data, such as parts, related changes, and data sheets. The last tab of the navigation also shows data that's been pulled from a third party system, Jira, to show additional task checklist information. While our standard out of the box apps are focused on PLM content and processes, you saw a glimpse of how custom apps with Connected PLM can be easily connected with third party enterprise systems. For example,
06:57 to display additional tasks or maybe cost or inventory information within the part structure of a product. In addition to electronic signature support, we also released a new enhancement for the Contribute Report a Problem app. The Report a Problem app is a great example of enabling this bi-directional communication between the rest of the enterprise back to engineering. With the new use case support in the Report a Problem App, users looking at documents or drawings or parts can
07:29 report any issues that they see immediately. This way, engineering is aware if certain roles don't have the latest drawing version, if the document describing the procedure is wrong, or if the screws manufacturing has are the wrong size, and so on. The Problem report is created in Windchill with the description, attachments, and any other details submitted by the end user, where a change admin can review and triage appropriately to the correct group in order to determine severity and remediation of the issue.
08:02 Equipping more stakeholders with a ThingWorx Navigate digital app to report issues and problems as they arise will help you drive improved product and process quality. The following are a few examples of real Navigate customers that are breaking down organizational silos and extending product data across the enterprise. Bosch Rexroth needed to create an easier way for non engineering teams across the organization to engage with the product data in an intelligent way.
08:33 Having consolidated 25 years of data across disparate systems on to Windchill, they now use Navigate to make that product and enterprise data accessible to teams outside of engineering, resulting in millions of euros of cost savings. For Johnson and Johnson, they needed data democratization and better collaboration to reduce product development time to get to market quicker. By creating a Doc viewer portal for non PLM users that requires minimal training, they now deliver key documents
09:05 to regulatory and shopfloor users to perform standard operating procedures. In the words of J & J, Navigate is simple. The best user experience that we can give our enterprise users, along with the fastest enterprise integration. So much value to our users. Zf manages a huge number of projects with different products across teams around the globe. They needed to help their teams navigate the complexity to deliver the right information in the right context for the right people.
09:37 ZF standardized on Windchill and ThingWorx Navigate as the backbone for an enterprise wide digital thread. With agile development through ThingWorx Navigate, they've extended information to their plants in role based apps, noting that users don't need to hunt for something and they are always sure that this is the correct data. If somebody is doing something now in the system, a millisecond later, I can see it in my app. The customer examples and testimony show that ThingWorx Navigate's highly tailorable
10:10 apps enable realtime data sharing to the shopfloor, quality department, and other non engineering users across an enterprise. Whether searching for approved and released drawings or submitting a problem report, the Navigate experience is seamless, fast and secure. I'd encourage you to try ThingWorx Navigate for yourself by accessing a free trial at the link below. We covered the direct out of the box value you can get from our standard ThingWorx
10:41 Navigate view and Contribute offerings. We talked about key enhancements in 9.3, including electronic signature. We showed how connected PLM enables ease of custom app development and multi system connectivity for business specific needs. And we put a spotlight on the Report a Problem app to allow anyone in your enterprise to report an issue including the ability to submit it from an affected object within a View app. There's a lot of exciting new functionality coming in our next releases
11:12 to continue to deliver on our ThingWorx Navigate mission of helping you democratize and extend PLM data across your global enterprise, breaking down silos for a more collaborative and productive workforce.