Key takeaways:
- Digital transformation is a well-defined trend that is key to long-term business success and COVID-19 is accelerating the transformation process.
- A well-developed digital thread that enables a comprehensive, actionable digital twin that can span the full extended enterprise value chain is critical to remaining competitive.
- Digital threads and digital twins are most easily accomplished with platform solutions. The flexibility of modern platforms enables companies to innovate faster with fewer IT technology-based limitations.
- Xcelerator, Siemens Digital Industries Software’s solution portfolio, supports the end-to-end lifecycle and includes Mendix, a modern, innovative low code application and integration platform. Mendix is a graphical modeling solution that enables building enterprise and user productivity applications quickly across the extended enterprise, not just to support product development.
Manufacturing enterprises in every industry are being challenged to develop smart, connected products while competing for customers who demand these products to be more cost effective at supporting their business strategy. Product complexity and differentiation are being driven by software and electronics. Companies need to implement product development environments that span all the functional domains—mechanical, electronics, and software. Users need to be able to collaborate with data from each of these domains as needed, while business processes ensure configuration integrity and traceability across all domains and lifecycle states. Product complexity is also reflected in the need for more intelligent production environments and in-service management solutions.1
Manufacturers looking for ways in which to turn complexity into a competitive advantage must undergo a digital transformation—they need to use digital technologies to change how they operate at all levels. Companies must be able to implement tailored environments that enable personnel at all levels to quickly and easily access the data they need to make informed decisions faster, thereby improving business performance. They must also be able to respond to changes in the work climate driven by initiatives such as Work From Home and the impact of COVID-19, which are forcing faster, more complete digitalization of data and processes. They must be able to adapt their business models to changing circumstances by leveraging smart, connected capabilities.
To be successful companies need to implement extended enterprise integrated value chains built on open ecosystems that span functional domains (mechanical, electronics, software), operational domains (development, production, operations, and service) and include partners, suppliers, and customers.
A modern value chain ecosystem must span the extended enterprise providing a seamless, transparent ability to work within the company as well as with its partners and customers across an integrated heterogenous environment. The ecosystem must be built on a flexible, adaptable, scalable architecture that supports multiple infrastructures—on-premises, cloud, edge—as each participating organization will have made different choices for the technology, solutions, and implementation based on their individual business needs. And because each participating organization is different, it must be personalized to those needs so companies can adapt as technologies and business strategies evolve.
The ecosystem needs to link solutions beyond product definition—it must cover the full lifecycle from inception through removal from service. The ecosystem must enable implementation of a true lifecycle digital thread. A digital thread is a communication framework that connects data flows, which can be used to produce an integrated, holistic view of an asset’s data from physical and virtual systems (i.e., its digital twin) throughout its lifecycle across traditionally siloed functional perspectives. It enables traceability and helps speed and improve decision quality.
Enabled by the digital thread, a digital twin is a virtual representation (i.e., digital surrogate) of a physical asset or collection of physical assets (i.e., physical twin) that exploits data flow to and from the associated physical assets and continually evolves as it accompanies its real-world physical companion throughout its lifecycle.
Many different applications and solutions exist within a value chain ecosystem, each of which addresses different business needs and processes. A modern ecosystem needs modern applications. This means applications that are role-related and context-driven to provide maximum ease of use for all people that work with them. Being tailored to user roles reduces training time, speeds adoption, and increases efficiency. Because data is provided in context of the tasks being done, workers are able to focus on the task at hand, not the technology itself. This enables them to make higher quality, better informed decisions, faster.
Effective applications are designed to integrate diverse modern technologies (even legacy technologies) to expose the data and processes each user needs to accomplish their tasks. Simply reporting or providing data is not sufficient. Transforming data to information and knowledge—that is making it understandable and actionable—is where the rubber meets the road and is required for success. Business problems cross domains and are continually evolving. Modern applications must be built with flexible, adaptable, technologies that enable a company to easily and quickly update their business solutions as changing circumstances dictate.
Mendix, Siemens Digital Industries Software’s (Siemens) low-code application development platform, empowers companies and individuals to create business-unique applications or mashups that enable appropriate context for stakeholders so they can make and execute fast, accurate decisions about product development, manufacturing, services, and most important “change.” Mendix is used throughout the Xcelerator portfolio and connects with non-Siemens applications so an entire extended enterprise landscape can be supported.
Xcelerator,2 is a comprehensive, integrated portfolio of software solutions, services, and an application development/integration platform designed to reduce barriers to innovation. Its application development platform provides a robust foundation for collaborative product creation and manufacturing and acts as a catalyst to a manufacturing enterprise’s digital transformation.
Xcelerator is both a wide and deep portfolio encompassing technology and solutions that support the full design, realize, optimize extended value chain lifecycle.
- Design—All domains and functions such as mechanical, electrical, electronic, software, formulated/process
- Realize—Manufacturing support, process planning, digital manufacturing, virtual commissioning
- Optimize—Track and analyze in-service use and performance, schedule maintenance
Xcelerator’s authoring applications enable domain experts to make actionable, data-driven decisions based on performance analytics and simulations independent of data source—creating a closed-loop data environment of sense-decide-act. Xcelerator’s integration and application platform tools enable enterprises to blur the boundaries of traditional stand-alone domains of electrical engineering, mechanical design, and software development by integrating them within a single collaborative environment.
MindSphere is Siemens’ IoT as a Service solution used to support IoT and connected, smart devices, and the factory floor. It, with Mendix, enables companies to create closed-loop feedback between service, production, and development.
The entire Xcelerator portfolio, designed so all its services can be consumed by Mendix, helps companies create an extended enterprise value chain digital thread and make a comprehensive digital twin actionable across domains and disciplines. Mendix is a key enabling component of Xcelerator. It enables developers, business analysts, and power users to rapidly create and deploy company-unique multi-experience composite applications across their extended enterprise ecosystem. Mendix provides the tools to create personalized applications and link information to create a digital thread that spans the extended ecosystem and support comprehensive, actionable digital twins.
Mendix, a low code platform was acquired by Siemens in 2018 and already had extensive success in enterprise software. Prior to its acquisition by Siemens, it had a 60,000+ global developer community and supported a wide variety of enterprise solutions, both on-premises and cloud native. Since the acquisition, adoption and use have grown significantly due to its ease of use, and Siemens states there are now over 135,000 developers3 in the global Mendix community.
Siemens uses the Mendix platform to (1) integrate solutions and develop applications within the Xcelerator portfolio, and (2) connect Xcelerator solutions to the broader extended enterprise. Mendix supports integration, application, and user interface development for both Siemens-developed and third-party solutions including those independent of any Siemens technology. Mendix is used to expose the various components of Xcelerator as resources and microservices, enabling rapid data and user interface integration. Siemens customers can use Mendix to expand their Xcelerator-based solutions, develop in-house business-unique solutions, and connect to data sources across their extended value chain. CIMdata believes this is a significant benefit for customers as they are able to get company-unique business solutions in the hands of their users much faster than is possible with traditional development tools.
Within CIMdata’s consulting engagements we often see data stored in silos at both established industrial companies and startups. Even with advanced reporting and analytics tools, users struggle to get the data needed to make decisions quickly and with confidence. The Mendix MX Data Hub, shown in Figure 1, provides a solution to data silos. Mendix OOTB connectors and microservices expose data as a catalog making it easy to find and use, while the Mendix Studio solutions allow analysts and developers to create applications to solve business-unique problems. These are true applications, not just reports from a data warehouse, as they can read and write data from diverse sources and create a rich user experience, while preserving a single logical source of truth.
Figure1—Mendix MX Data Hub
EQ Technologic, a long time Siemens partner, has incorporated the MX Data Hub into their solution suite. They have extended their Data as a Service (DaaS) solution to expose industrial data within the MX Data Hub. There are over sixty proven connectors within the DaaS solution adding to the richness of data that can be exposed and acted upon with Mendix.
CIMdata has seen several examples of Mendix applications and one of the more interesting is the integration of Capital, the electrical design solution from Mentor, with the new Teamcenter configurator solution. By enabling Capital with Mendix, the configurator is able to drive both mechanical and electrical data within product configurations.
Modern product development is challenging, and companies must digitally transform across their entire value chain if they want to remain competitive. COVID-19 is accelerating the transformation process. A common digital transformation end state at CIMdata’s clients is to have enabled a comprehensive, actionable digital twin leveraging an end-to-end digital thread that spans the extended value chain. Creating the digital thread is a complex problem, due to data models, silos, solutions, and process variations across the extended value chain.
Mendix is a one of the newest solutions within Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio. This solution portfolio spans and integrates the lifecycle domains of design, realize, and optimize with a broad, deep suite of tools, applications, and solutions. Mendix enables the creation of business-specific applications across the Xcelerator portfolio and with third-party solutions. Given their functional breadth and solution enablement capabilities, companies looking to define and improve their extended enterprise value chain and move faster, should include Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio and Mendix in their evaluation and selection process.
1 Research for this commentary was partially supported by Siemens Digital Industries Software
2 https://sw.siemens.com/portfolio
3 https://developers.mendix.com/