Sharing open collaboration and joint innovation to drive digital transformation across the product life cycle
Key Takeaways
- Growing complexity is affecting all industries and successful companies are digitally transforming their business to become more agile and productive.
- Digital transformation is a continuing journey and companies need to establish strategic partners to enable them throughout that journey.
- Accenture has in-depth experience with many clients in different industries providing the insights that form the base of knowledge needed to pursue digital transformation possibilities.
- Accenture and Siemens Digital Industries Software partnership delivers the expertise, technologies, and coordinated management to enable effective business transformation.
Introduction
Between rapid technology evolution, increasing product complexity, increasing cost of goods, labor shortage, and supply chain disruptions, manufacturers around the globe are feeling a pressing need to transform. Continuing success demands that businesses change how they work–develop, produce, and service―to both attract the needed staff and create products and services customers want.[1]
Addressing these challenges requires companies to adopt new technologies to digitally transform themselves and how they work. Companies must integrate information from more sources across the product, production, and service lifecycles so they can make faster, better-informed business and product design decisions.
Unfortunately, brownfield R&D tools and IT solutions no longer provide the capabilities companies need to successfully compete in today’s dynamic, global markets. New technologies (e.g., augmented reality, low code programming, artificial intelligence and generative AI, etc.) can provide so much more capability and opportunity and manufacturers want to seize it. To do so, they must adopt new technologies and processes and work digitally to achieve and maintain business profitability and success.
The Digital Transformation Imperative
Industry leaders and challengers alike must leverage new and evolving technologies to transform and digitalize their products and operational business models to work more effectively and competitively in todays’ global markets. Sustained competitive market success requires manufacturing enterprises of all sizes and in all industries to establish strategic partners that can help enable their needed business transformation.
Digitalization can improve how a company operates, its organizational and individual productivity, and can even lead to new service revenue opportunities by providing customers and manufacturers insights on product usage patterns and durability. Leveraging operational performance data leads to more complete service offerings and faster response, enhancements to existing products, and new product and systems development.
Digital transformation is much more than just digitizing documents and data, it is a fundamental change in the way companies and their personnel work. It impacts all aspects of a company’s business and must be implemented thoughtfully and carefully over time. Importantly, this transformation is not a “one and done”―it is an on-going journey that will continually evolve and impact a company’s people and processes, as well as communities at large by helping these companies achieve greater sustainability outcomes.
An effective digital transformation journey requires establishing long-term strategic partnerships that can evolve as the journey progresses.
Accenture and Siemens
Accenture
Accenture is a global leader in combining technology and human ingenuity to drive change, using the power of data and digital to reimagine the products companies make and how they make them. Accenture serves diverse industries including consumer goods, aerospace & defense, life sciences, , industrial equipment, automotive, and more. Accenture calls their integrated approach to digital engineering and manufacturing Industry X.
Industry X combines the power of data and digital across the product lifecycle, applying technologies such as AR/VR, cloud, AI, 5G, robotics, and digital twins to embed greater resilience, productivity, and sustainability into their clients’ core operations and product designs. And to create new, hyper-personalized experiences and intelligent products and services that customers desire.
Accenture helps clients to digitally transform–reimagining how products, infrastructure and services are:
- Designed and engineered
- Sourced and supplied
- Manufactured and constructed
- Serviced, returned, and renewed
Siemens Digital Industries Software
Siemens Digital Industries Software (Siemens) helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware, and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform and portfolio. Siemens’ software and their comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering, manufacturing, and service processes to turn today's ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries.
Key Elements of a Successful Partnership
There are five key elements in every successful partnership. Both parties must contribute to and support these elements. They must:
- Jointly develop new technologies and business solutions with each providing their domain expertise.
- Speak with one voice to their clients from C-Level to working staff level and work with their clients to jointly design and implement the business transformations that will deliver maximum client value.
- Both invest in building strong and complementary capabilities and joint offerings including technology, business solutions, processes, change management, training, support, and many others.
- Jointly develop an integrated set of assets (human and technological) and use joint methodologies, automation, migration processes and tools, and other capabilities to accelerate and de-risk delivery of client value.
- Share responsibility for client success by taking their commitments to the top levels of their respective organizations (and their clients), manage their joint workforces (and the clients) in a coordinated manner to optimize resource productivity and time to value.
The Accenture-Siemens partnership embraces and leverages these partnership elements to help deliver maximum value to their joint clients.
Accenture―Siemens Relationship
Accenture and Siemens have adopted and are delivering on these 5 key elements for a successful partnership. They are jointly developing and refining the capabilities and solutions their clients need to achieve the benefits that can be delivered.
Accenture has significantly invested–and continues to invest–in working with Siemens to create industry solutions based on Siemens technologies and its domain expertise. It has over 1,000 personnel world-wide trained and experienced in implementing Siemens technology and solutions.
Accenture has expertise in design, engineering, construction management, manufacturing, technology, consulting, operations, and cultural change management. They help their clients solve business and operational challenges and realize transformations quickly, sustainably, and cost effectively. Accenture works with a global network of market leaders and innovators to give their clients the ability to move quickly and scale faster, with access to top talent, technology, and expertise.
Siemens provides the underlying technology platform and functional capabilities (Xcelerator) required for business digital transformation and product development, production, and service. Accenture works with Siemens to develop and deploy industry- and functional-specific solutions built on Siemens Xcelerator technology―it has a deep understanding of how Siemens solutions can be most effectively applied within an enterprise to deliver maximum productivity and value.
Together, the two partners have helped create business and market value for clients across all industries. Accenture and Siemens bring their joint cloud-powered solutions for product engineering＜https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/thought-leadership/2022/05/25/accenture-siemens-transforming-product-production-engineering-cloud/＞ to manufacturers, enabling distributed multi-disciplinary development teams to collaborate, while taking out infrastructure cost. Both companies also help their clients with their joint intelligent service and asset lifecycle solution to increase machine uptime and lifespan and optimize operational performance.
Accenture also works with other Siemens’ partners (e.g., Microsoft Azure, AWS, SAP, etc.) in developing focused solutions optimized for maximum productivity and performance within that partners’ environment―effectively leveraging the capabilities of both the Accenture and Siemens ecosystems to deliver broader capabilities and benefits.
Accenture has deep expertise in managing and governing the complex three-way relationships (business, technology provider, solution provider) required for successful business transformation and growth. Siemens proactively participates in these activities and shares governance responsibility with Accenture and their joint customers.
Concluding Remarks
Successful companies must undertake a continuing transformation journey. One that will enable them to evolve their business model, products, and services as technology and their customer demands evolve. They need to establish strategic partnerships with both technology developers and business solution implementors who can work together with them to drive transformation and deliver on-going value.
Accenture and Siemens have a long-standing strategic relationship that delivers an effective blend of technology and business domain expertise. Accenture is a leader in domain-focused business strategy and technology implementation. Siemens is a leader in the PLM and Automation industries. Working together (and with each other’s extensive ecosystems), the Accenture-Siemens partnership can enable companies to plan and execute the digital transformation journey required for long term business success. Evidence of their effective partnership was on display at this years’ Hannover Messe Industrial Trade show as they jointly met clients, participated on panels, and coordinated booth visits.
CIMdata recommends that companies include Accenture and Siemens in their evaluations of the technology and partners needed to help them transform their engineering, manufacturing, and service operations and accelerate their digital transformation journey.