Nov 08
Section perpendiculaire du moulin des Verdiers (Jean-Jacque Lequeu, 1778)

PLM as an Innovation Platform

By Innovation, PLM No Comments

The Promise of PLM

A recent discussion titled Dassault Systèmes Bets Big on a Product Innovation Platform argues that the role of a PLM platform is to bundle different data sources and enable smooth data exchange among tools, processes and users. While not incorrect, this view is potentially limiting.

File and data interoperability, single source of (electrical/mechanical/software) truth, hardware/software development synchronization, and similar notions have been the core principles of PLM for quite some time; some, in fact, for a very long time. How well PLM vendors achieve these goals is a topic for a separate conversation. Read More

Oct 29
Steam Shovel in front of Hollywoodland Sign (C. 1925)

Caterpillar: Smart Iron Delivers Customer Value

By Automotive, Telematics 2 Comments

From Product Promise of the Past to the Promise of the Future

In the pre digital revolution economy, products were defined by technical features and detailed specifications that product marketers and designers believed were important to customers. Product companies enumerated technical specifications and delineated contract terms to which they promised to adhere.

In the digital era, the product promise of the past is quickly transforming into the product promise of the future, in which the competitive edge is achieved not by technical specifications but rather by the ability to help customers realize meaningful business outcomes.

The key to success in the era of the pervasive digitalization and ubiquitous connectivity of the Industrial Internet of Things is to shift the product strategy away from tightly controlling products and supply chains, and waging price wars aimlessly and in vain, to focusing on delivering and measuring customer value. Product thinking must shift from inside the company to customer value and a dynamic, interconnected, and collaborative ecosystem that continually realigns itself around worthy innovation. Read More

Oct 11
The Persistence of Memory

Teaching Learning Machines to Forget

By Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning No Comments

Many tasks in which humans excel are extremely difficult for robots and computers to perform. Especially challenging are decision-making tasks that are non-deterministic and, to use human terms, are based on experience and intuition rather than on predetermined algorithmic response. A good example of a task that is difficult to formalize and encode using procedural programming is image recognition and classification. For instance, teaching a computer to recognize that the animal in a picture is a cat is practically impossible to accomplish using traditional programming. Read More

Sep 17
Time Warp (Mike Gambino, 2011)

Autonomous Vehicles: Slow Down to Go Faster

By Automotive One Comment

Reprioritization of Autonomous Vehicles Development is Needed

Everyone is in the self-driving car race. Google has been developing autonomous driving capabilities since 2009 and continues to demonstrate incremental improvement in its autonomous driving technology since. By 2012, Google’s fleet has logged 300,000 self-driven miles. Tesla’s AutoPilot, another household name on the driverless car stage, has logged nearly 250 million miles of hands-free driving. Delphi’s Roadrunner completed a nearly 3,400-mile cross-country trip, 98% of it in self-driving mode.

Fearing the perception of falling behind in the race to take the checkered flag, practically all major automakers and suppliers are investing heavily in self-driving technologies and are very vocal telling their own bold vision of crash-free, stress-free traffic. And if you are a car executive who doesn’t dream big enough, you are out! Read More

Sep 06

Aras Announces $40 Million Investment Led by Silver Lake

By Mergers & Acquisitions, PLM No Comments

Continuing its strong growth momentum over the past few years, Aras Corp. announced today it has raised $40 Million in a new round of funding from private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and GE Ventures

The funding will be used to expand Aras’s global growth and extend the company’s PLM technology, especially in offering customers comprehensive digital twin capabilities – the ability to create and manage a complete and exact digital replica of a physical product in operation. Aras technology will give Internet of Things (IoT) solution providers and users powerful configuration management tools to establish and manage IoT information in the context of detailed and up-to-date product configuration throughout the extended product life cycle: as designed, as built and installed, as maintained, and as operated.

Aras digital twin expansion strategy continues to build on the growth momentum in IoT services from cloud infrastructure providers such as Azure, AWS, Bluemix, and MindSphere, some of whom are already Aras partners.