Digital Engineering

Why Digital Engineering?

Digital engineering enables you to improve product designs, quality, and manufacturability, all while establishing the foundation for a digital thread that improves cross-functional collaboration by making authoritative product data accessible across the enterprise. Whether your company uses an engineer-to-order, configure-to-order, assemble-to-order or assemble-to-stock strategy—digital engineering provides the most efficient and cost-effective way to meet demand, drive collaborative design, and deliver continuous improvement for your physical products.

Turn ideas into innovative products with collaborative computer-aided design (CAD), application lifecycle management (ALM), and product lifecycle management (PLM) software.

digital Innovation Begins with Engineering

Getting high-quality products to market fast helps you delight your customers and stay ahead of the competition. At PTC, engineering transformation is in our DNA. We’ve been developing cutting-edge digital engineering solutions for over 30 years to help product teams bring more innovative, sustainable, and awe-inspiring products to market. It’s your innovation that inspires us. That’s why we’re continuously improving the technologies behind our leading software solutions—including how we deliver them to you. Our digital solutions transform how your teams design, produce, deliver, and service your products, so your business can stay on time and under budget.

Digital engineering delivers enterprise-wide value by optimizing product development processes, enabling closed-loop engineering, and facilitating the creation of more sustainable products for a circular economy.

How an Integrated IoT Suite Supports Digital Transformation for Industrial Companies

IoT data can enable companywide transformation by improving factory operations, providing a new level of supply chain visibility, and offering a digital feedback loop for engineering. Sales and marketing can drive targeted campaigns and upsell new products based on real-time customer data.

The service arm of the organization can use IoT data to provide more proactive or better-targeted services to customers. Many manufacturers are assessing how they can offer their products in a services-based model moving forward; IoT also serves as a key enabler of this DX goal. Manufacturers can reap benefits from IoT throughout their organizations, but they need to take a methodical approach that includes considerations across people, processes, and technology.

An organized approach to IoT is important given the range of use cases it can enable, the large number of stakeholders involved, and the various layers of enterprise and operational technology on which it depends.

Organizations should consider how the technology choices they make will impact their time to value, TCO, and risk posture. When organizations embark upon new technology projects, one of the first questions that come up is whether to build or buy the desired capabilities. For an industrial IoT project, enterprises should consider how they will gather data from the various IoT "things" in the environment, how they will integrate the data, and where they want to process and analyze data (for many companies, it will be both at an edge location and in the cloud).

They also need to think about modeling the data so applications can use it, storing the data, managing all of the disparate IoT devices, and building engaging application logic and workflows. This kind of reusable application base with parity across the edge, core, cloud, and multicloud is challenging to create and maintain, even for a software company. In addition to technical complexity, the do-it-yourself route exposes the business to various risks that can seriously impact the overall TCO and ROI of the project. For many organizations, choosing to rely on trusted technology partners to handle this complexity will allow them to apply more focus to their own core competencies.

Digital Transformation & IoT Engineering Journey

Transform the way that your engineers help you succeed in the digital transformation and IoT era. Redefine the nature and pace of your competition.

Digital Product Definition: A Single Source of Truth

Product data is often stored in various enterprise systems, leading to several negative consequences for users. Either they duplicate work because they don’t realize data already exists, or they lose time trying to compare it across systems for accuracy and consistency.

A digital product definition is an integrated system(s) of record with the most relevant, current product information—i.e. mechanical, electrical, and software components. Stakeholders across the development process can use it to fit their unique needs.

A digital product definition:

Reduces engineering hours and eliminates errors early
Improves first pass yields in manufacturing
Improves design reuse and reduces duplicative work

Universal Data Access Don’t Wait for Data – Get it Yourself in the Format You Need

Often only a select few stakeholders are able to access enterprise systems. And that means their colleagues stand in line to make requests not only for data—but for data to be delivered in a certain form. Very quickly this becomes a burdensome and inefficient arrangement for both parties.

Universal data access solves this problem. It provides in-context access to digital product and enterprise information that is simplified for the specific purpose and delivered securely and in the best format for its user.

Universal data access:

Improves visibility and collaboration
Enables better decisions faster
Increases efficiency to improve time to market

Performance Based Analysis Taking the Guesswork Out of Product Development

Too often product developers make assumptions about how a product will perform in the field without the benefit of real-world data. In addition, they can be overly-committed to using multiple physical prototypes to determine a product’s reliability and quality.

Performance-based analysis replaces assumptions with data that originates either in an existing product or from a prototype created for analysis.

Performance-based analysis:

Reduces costs by finding problems earlier in the design process
Reduces dependency on physical prototypes
Improves product reliability and uptime

Digital Product Traceability Monitor a Product Throughout its Lifecycle

It’s often hard to know what the root cause of a problem is, or what impact a change—no matter how minor—will have on the product further downstream.

Digital product traceability means having the ability to monitor a product and all of its information throughout its lifecycle: from design to the field. Using this information, stakeholders can review a product’s history to determine where a downstream issue first arose. Conversely, they are able to look forward to determine what sort of impact a design change will have on the product.

Digital product traceability:

Rapidly evaluates the impact of changes
Enables compliance with industry standards
Quickly identifies the root cause of problems occurring with products in the field

Digital Product Traceability: Monitor a Product Throughout its Lifecycle

Rapidly evaluates the impact of changes
Enables compliance with industry standards
Quickly identifies the root cause of problems occurring with products in the field

Design for Connectivity Get Data You Need – Not Data You Don’t Want

As sensors become cheaper and more ubiquitous, it is easy to collect data on how your products and systems are performing in the field. And to find yourself buried under an avalanche of possibly-relevant information.

In contrast, when you design for connectivity, you begin the product design process by placing sensors exactly where they will gather the data you most want. This ensures that you are creating secure, custom data streams as efficiently as possible.

Design for connectivity:

Strategically allocates functionality between the product, the cloud, and peripheral systems
Optimizes the usage of sensors to reduce cost and complexity
Simplifies analysis by creating only the data you need

Data Driven Design Better Informed Design Decisions Make Better Products

When you know how customers are using your product, you can meet their needs. But you need to base your decisions on facts, not assumptions.

With data-driven design, you can make better informed design decisions which can lead to improved business results. But first, you need to make the most of existing data from multiple products in the field. Start by applying data analytics. When you understand your data, you can identify issues and areas of improvement, as well as optimize your design to produce the highest quality product at the lowest cost.

Data-driven design:

Ensures that future products better meet the needs of customers
Improves quality by correcting design flaws based on actual usage
Targets design efforts to reduce product and development costs

Collaborative AR/VR Design Collaborate Like Never Before

Companies can now hire top engineering and design talent from all over the world. And those people can work from anywhere. But this convenience can turn into a burden when it slows a team’s ability to reach consensus and make timely decisions. Especially with design reviews.

By using AR/VR, teams can not only increase a design review’s effectiveness, but facilitate all team member’s rapid and full participation. Reviewers can see product data at either full scale or custom scale, and in a real-world environment. They then can provide feedback via text, drawing, or audio, which is integrated into the product development system so issues can be tracked.

Collaborative AR/VR design:

Increases participation of stakeholders from disparate locations
Enhances decision-making by incorporating voice, text, and drawn input directly into the product’s design history
Reduces the likelihood of a costly sophisticated design review by identifying issues early.

Constant Analysis: Fix Problems in the Early Stages

If your product fails once it is in the customer’s hands, how long would it take your team to find out and then issue a fix? The longer the wait, the more dissatisfied your customer. They know more than anyone how much downtime hurts their business.

Constant Analysis makes it possible for you to track and support your products in the field automatically, all the time. You’ll know, before the customer finds out, when your product needs attention. Then you can remotely deliver maintenance and upgrades. And you’ll learn how your customer is using your product, allowing you to make recommendations and expand upsell opportunities.

Constant Analysis allows you to:

Discover problems before the customer complains
Fix problems faster – across fleets of products in the field and in ongoing production
Proactively identify new sales opportunities with customers based on their actual usage

Predictive Performance Improvement Your Crystal Ball to Product 2.0

Constant Analysis allows you to:

Discover problems before the customer complains
Fix problems faster – across fleets of products in the field and in ongoing production
Proactively identify new sales opportunities with customers based on their actual usage

Digital Twin - Mirror, Mirror on the Wall… How’s My Product Doing After All?

Imagine that you still have access to your product, even though it has left the factory floor and now is in your customers’ hands. If that were the case, you would know how your customer actually was using the product. That would be handy information to have as you sell to prospective customers or talk to current ones about upgrading. Moreover, you’d have a complete picture of the product’s current and past states—which can help predict the future.

A digital twin does all of this, without requiring you to knock down your customers’ doors on a regular basis. With a digital twin, each manufactured asset has a maintained digital record of the current and past configuration or state—including changes to hardware and software components.

Complete traceability is just the beginning. Using the Digital Twin, you can monitor performance, security, open source, legal and regulatory compliance throughout the asset’s history.

Digital twin:

Improves profitability by analyzing the configurations of fleets of assets for future sales, recalls, or update opportunities
Improves decision making by analyzing individual assets against their real-world usage
Ensures security, legal, and regulatory compliance thanks to hardware and software configuration traceability

Outcome Based Design A New Way to Do Business

Constant Analysis allows you to:

Discover problems before the customer complains
Fix problems faster – across fleets of products in the field and in ongoing production
Proactively identify new sales opportunities with customers based on their actual usage

Distributed AR/VR Product Review

You need to inspect an individual product that is somewhere else – perhaps on a different floor or even in another country. And key stakeholders in other locations need to examine the product as well. Now you and they are able to do that when and where you wish.

Distributed AR/VR product review allows dispersed members of the organization, partners, and customers to interact virtually, and in real-time, with an individual product in the field. Moreover, multiple people can interact with the same fielded asset at the same time.

Distributed AR/VR product review:

Enables you to gain consensus faster by giving all participants access to the relevant data in the same environment
Improves decision making
Assists in getting more actionable feedback with real-time capture of feedback using text, video, and audio for offline review at a later date