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Digital Transformation

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is a strategic initiative that incorporates digital technologies across all areas of an organization. In manufacturing, it involves converting manual manufacturing operations into digital formats. These formats are commonly known as digital twins and simulate product development from designs and manufacturing processes to the virtual representations of physical factories. Digital technologies enable stakeholders to identify, mitigate, and remediate complexities by running multiple manufacturing scenarios automatically, simultaneously, and within minutes.

As a result, manufacturers can evaluate and optimize products, processes, and operations to innovate better and faster, provide more customer-driven value, and accelerate time to market.

What Are the Benefits of Digital Transformation?

Today’s manufacturers need every competitive advantage that they can get. Digital transformation provides myriad benefits, including

  • Reduced Design Time/Iterations: Digital solutions ensure that critical data is shared across the entire product lifecycle. Utilizing digital twins reduces iterations and costly late-stage engineering change orders (ECOs), which further delay the time to market.
  • Performance and Competitive Advantages: Successful digital transformations drive performance and competitive advantage. Productivity and customer-driven value improve, and new growth and innovation opportunities open up.
  • Time to Market Acceleration: Digital solutions foster greater communication and collaboration across the product development lifecycle, streamlining and automating many processes and operations. As a result, there are reduced design iterations, fewer supply chain and sourcing bottlenecks, and lessened production issues. All enable products to get to market faster.
  • Improved Supplier Relationships and Supplier Pricing: Digital technologies enhance supplier relationships. For example, manufacturers can use supplier material, pricing, and production capabilities from 87 global regions accessed through Regional Data Libraries (RDLs) to determine the right suppliers and foster stronger partnerships with them. Digital solutions that allow cost engineers to conduct a should cost analysis enable them to initiate win-win negotiation discussions with suppliers based on more accurate data. Request for Quotes (RFQs) can be dramatically reduced with an automated quoting solution.
  • Sustainability Initiatives: Successful manufacturers are leveraging their digital transformation (digital twin) investments to make effective decisions based on cost, sustainability, and manufacturability data gathered throughout the organization. For instance, digital sustainability solutions allow manufacturers to weigh cost vs carbon in the early stages of design when a product’s carbon footprint risk is highest. These tools also support more sustainable sourcing of materials and production. Finally, they facilitate transparent, auditable reporting of sustainability efforts, improving regulatory compliance and stakeholder confidence.
  • Greater Agility: The pandemic, supply chain issues, global conflicts, and economic uncertainty have underscored that those manufacturers that are agile in the face of such disruptions will fare better in the long run. Digital solutions support more proactive operations and enable them to pivot more quickly should the need arise.

What Are the Steps to Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is a large-scale and complex initiative that impacts the entire organization. It requires a thoughtful and detailed strategy, well-defined objectives, and availability and allocation of the resources necessary to successfully implement it. Although every organization has unique needs, capabilities, and goals, below is a general digital transformation roadmap:

  1. Nail down your digital transformation strategy as noted above. It will expedite the process.
  2. Partner with companies that have a strong track record in developing and implementing digital transformation solutions. This includes considering all the necessary digital tools to streamline operations and optimize resources and product development.
  3. Leverage the digital twin with digital factories. At the onset, create a digital thread to help facilitate the process and onboard organizational adoption. Embrace digital twins, automation, robotics, additive manufacturing, and artificial intelligence as building blocks.
  4. Automate engineering and sourcing processes to ensure greater efficiencies, cost and time savings, and product optimization throughout product development.
  5. Integrate manufacturing and cost data with critical systems to help you drive better, more complete decisions.
  6. Choose cloud platforms over on-premise for greater flexibility, scalability, collaboration, and profitability.

Reduce Late-Stage Designs, Get to Market Faster

Digital factories help pinpoint manufacturability issues and cost outliers before you kick the can too far down the product development road

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