Deliver Sustainable Innovation Across the Enterprise

When designing new products, engineers must consider the environmental impact of all the materials and processes used across the product lifecycle. With a PLM-enabled digital thread, your business can better evaluate design and sourcing decisions for the impact they will have on the product’s environmental footprint. Everything from a products’ parts and components to its electrical, mechanical, and software systems can be managed and traced within a single authoritative PLM system, allowing your teams to more easily automate and standardize sustainable processes across the entire product lifecycle.

Generative design is a 3D CAD capability that uses AI to autonomously create optimal designs from a set of system design requirements. Engineers specify their requirements and sustainability goals, including preferred materials (such as metal vs. plastic) and manufacturing processes—and the generative engine automatically produces a manufacture-ready design. Your team can then visualize the best combination of materials and design which meets the specified requirements and sustainability goals. Generative design also uses cloud simulation, which reduces the need for iterative physical prototyping, saving your business additional time and material waste.

Today’s customers want cheaper, lighter, more durable products that will last a lifetime. With analysis and simulation-led design, engineers can test the stresses and loads under which their products will operate, helping them to produce higher quality, more sustainable products while reducing the need to build and iterate wasteful physical prototypes. Simulation and analysis tools enable designers to get instant feedback on design decisions while they work, for a better understanding of how specific designs will perform under real-world conditions. This lets designers find potential problems earlier in the design process, where they are significantly easier to fix.

Are rising costs for natural resources like energy and raw materials creeping into your production margins? With a digital performance management platform like ThingWorx, your business can gain better visibility into its operational performance to quickly identify production bottlenecks that are contributing to inefficient usage of resources.

“Data is often trapped in silos across many teams and many different locations,” says May Ann Madlansacay, Director of Solution Program Management at PTC. “This is where ThingWorx comes in. It provides powerful visualization on dashboards, it displays thousands of data points to track production in real time, and it gives you deep insights into resource management, overall equipment effectiveness, and enterprise optimization—and that’s going to be key for making decisions that drive sustainability.”

Advances in industry 4.0 technology are making it easier than ever before to reduce waste during production runs. Technologies like IoT and augmented reality can help frontline employees reduce waste in the forms of scrap, re-work, defects, and downtime, while also making the workplace safer.

When establishing more sustainable manufacturing processes, collaboration between manufacturing and engineering is critical. PLM accelerates enterprise-wide collaboration by establishing a cross-functional digital thread that enables engineering and manufacturing to work concurrently. With this digital foundation in place, manufacturers can create associative, traceable manufacturing BOMs derived from engineering data while driving closed-loop quality by connecting quality data with product designs.

Every dispatch and truck roll represents a small contribution to the overall amount of CO2 emissions associated with your business. The good news? Today’s service teams are reducing truck rolls and time on site by monitoring and predicting potential problems before they occur, resolving service issues remotely, and empowering end users with self-service tools to eliminate the need for a technician altogether. When field technicians must travel on-site, PTC’s service optimization solutions empower them to understand the root-cause of issues in advance, so they can arrive with the needed parts, documentation, work instructions, and training.

Certain industries require OEMs to have an extensive network of spare parts that are ready for on-demand utilization. For many, the result is a complex service supply chain with a larger-than-necessary environmental footprint.

An effective service parts management strategy can help your business overcome its service supply chain challenges by forecasting part demand and optimizing part inventories across multiple locations, to reduce the amount of spare parts being produced and sent to warehouses. With PTC’s Servigistics solution, your business can drive sustainability across its service supply chain by maximizing equipment utilization, avoiding downtime, and procuring new parts only when critically necessary.

When products last longer than expected, they create greater lifetime value for customers. Technologies that provide over-the-air software updates and real-time visibility into product behavior help to extend the lifespan of products by creating opportunities for predictive service and closed-loop engineering, while also unlocking digital upgrade business models.

To stay competitive, you need a competent, agile workforce with constantly evolving talent, knowledge, and skills. Augmented reality enables you to rapidly develop and upskill your workforce with highly effective training and work instructions that employees can view on-demand—whether they’re in the factory, the field, or working remotely. PTC’s Vuforia AR solutions are viewable with a variety of devices, including the mobile devices that many of your employees already carry.

To attract a rising generation of digital natives and retain existing talent that’s aging out of the workforce, industrial businesses must quickly transition to more engaging ways of working and training employees. Augmented reality can help you differentiate your employee experience by accelerating learning and skills development, supporting safety and compliance, and providing greater flexibility to employees via virtual training.

The ability for frontline employees to follow health and safety guidance is critical for ensuring a safe, productive workplace and avoiding lost time incidents, unplanned downtime, and compliance costs. Augmented reality enables a safer, more productive workforce by providing your frontline employees with on-demand access to expert support, and hands-free visual instructions that are easier to interpret than paper-based manuals. Delivering immersive training experiences to employees via augmented reality allows you to visually highlight workplace hazards, present detailed step-by-step instructions, and display real-time asset performance data.