Digital Performance Management Solution

Since the beginning of manufacturing, companies have pursued world-class performance through continuous improvement. Digital is the paradigm shift that offers a huge new advantage.

Manufacturing environments are extraordinarily complex with a multitude of variables and disparate data sources. There are functionally siloed people, shared and dedicated processes, and multiple products—and they all need to be harmoniously synchronized to effectively problem solve.

These challenges often mean that thousands of variables are managed through inefficient, incomplete, and—unfortunately—out-of-date reporting efforts.

These realities make world class performance difficult to attain. While best in class factories can operate at 85% capacity utilization, or OEE (overall equipment effectiveness), most companies still fall short of this performance level. Instead, they operate closer to an average of 40–60% OEE.

Digital Performance Management provides manufacturers with an industry solution for closed-loop operational excellence. 

• Achieve true transformational impact by capturing and sustaining double-digit efficiency improvements at scale.
• Identify and resolve manufacturing constraints more rapidly, understanding the dynamics between bottlenecks and the prioritized order of bottlenecks to address.

Digital Performance Management replaces out-of-date, siloed reporting tools with a closed-loop solution that drives operational excellence, by helping to identify, prioritize, and solve the biggest issues that constrain production efficiency. The solution systematically identifies bottlenecks and prioritizes actions for improvement. It collects and normalizes production data to a standard metric: time lost. This helps customers engage every level of the organization to help solve problems and regain lost hours of production.

The solution creates a closed-loop cycle that manufacturers can use to monitor current performance, prioritize areas to improve production, analyze production losses to determine root cause loss reasons, improve performance with prescriptive, targeted actions, and confirm performance levels within and across facilities.

For the first time, Digital Performance Management links frontline, operational data to bottom line financial impact.

Digital Performance Management closed loop approach to operational excellence

• Prioritize production improvement with Bottleneck Analysis
• Analyze production losses with Performance Analysis
• Track performance improvements with Action Tracker
• View site-level performance and compare across similar manufacturing sites with Scorecard
• Monitor current performance with Production Dashboard

As a large manufacturer, with 30+ sites, what would it mean if you could unlock up to 20% additional productivity time at each of these sites?

How would you take advantage of this opportunity? You could drive more revenue but hold costs the same, reduce costs but maintain your current output, increase service levels, decrease lead times—or some combination to drive measurable and sustainable P&L impact for your company. Time truly is the universal language of value in manufacturing.

A $5 billion company with 50 sites that adopts Digital Performance Management can fulfill an additional $2 million in orders with the additional capacity without additional CapEx. Or the company could cut $2 million in operating costs. Either way, margins improve while the costs per unit decrease. While these numbers sound good on their own, at enterprise scale across 50 sites this yields an additional $100 million to the bottom line that can be reinvested in any number of ways including R&D, employee training, or capital improvements.

PTC’s customers have utilized additional capacity to improve their product mix, drive down order backlogs, increase service levels, improve morale, and even drive down inventories to lower their working capital. With PTC’s Digital Performance Management solution, manufacturers can realize the true value of time across their enterprise.

Operationally, these improvements are driven by reductions in:

• Planned and unplanned downtime
• Changeover time
• Speed losses based on best demonstrated speeds by SKU
• Small stops or micro stops
• Scrap losses

There’s a great deal of hype about the potential for achieving transformational outcomes as result of digitizing manufacturing operations with Industry 4.0 technologies. Leading companies realize double-digit impact with technologies such as Industrial IoT, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and hybrid cloud computing.

As an early Industrial IoT pioneer, PTC has emerged as a market leader for manufacturing digital transformation. Through our experience working with thousands of clients, we have identified Digital Performance Management as a gamechanger for manufacturing excellence.

This position is also validated outside of PTC’s customer base. The World Economic Forum recognized it as “a must-have use case. It underpins value both directly and indirectly through additional use cases”. Additionally, many thought leaders and analysts like McKinsey & Company and Forrester reveal that operational transparency should be a critical focus for manufacturers.

Digital Performance Management, the high-impact use case: 

• Digital Performance Management is recognized as a must have use case
• This use case validated outside of PTC customer base
• Underpins value assurance both directly and indirectly
• Thought leaders and analysts like McKinsey & Company and Forrester identify operational transparency as critical

The foundation underpinning today’s performance management systems is comprised of distinct IT and OT data networks. These networks have historically maintained separate data sources and structures where manual integration and data manipulation are used to enable performance reporting. This data complexity leads to incomplete and outdated analysis with little insight to the constraints that impact productivity.

With modern Industry 4.0 technologies, companies can bridge the gap between these data networks while still maintaining existing “brownfield” infrastructure. The architectural approach combines disparate IT and OT data sources, abstracts and normalizes data to enable a new foundation capable of birthing innovative new processes and applications. Digital Performance Management utilizes this foundation to ensure that IT and OT data combine to provide timely insights to problem-solving opportunities and outcomes that directly align to P&L impact.

Capitalize on I4.0 architectural foundation to:

• Enable a systematic, always updated approach to digital performance management
• Combine frontline IT and OT data to prioritize, identify, action on, and measure problem-solving opportunities

You need a platform approach that meets you where you are—one that doesn’t ask you to rip and replace all your existing infrastructure, but instead minimizes the disruption to your factory ecosystem and aligns with your future digital transformation direction.

ThingWorx, Digital Performance Management’s foundational platform, supports many use cases and workloads in a consistent, cohesive, and comprehensive way. You don’t want to manage and administer yet another system from yet another vendor with varied logins and administrative processes. The platform eliminates the need to train users on different toolsets and its cohesive nature doesn’t require numerous logins that need to be managed across your corporate infrastructure.

At the end of the day, PTC’s pre-built solutions address your top use cases rapidly and easily. At the same time, the underlying platform is inherently extensible and future proofed, meeting your foundational needs and growing with your unique situation.

Both accelerate and simplify your digital transformation journey to:

• Avoid a multiyear “big dig” approach.
• Achieve accelerated time to value with small proof points that quickly prove value
• Start rapidly with easily implemented projects
• Improve ability to scale and deliver true transformation
• Ensure the platform aligns to your architectural direction with support for public, private, and hybrid cloud

There are numerous performance management systems on the market today and hundreds—if not thousands—of OEE point solution applications. None of these traditional systems provides the full picture of production capacity and accountability across machines, people, and processes. What your business needs is closed-loop, continuous improvement at the product, line, plant, or network-wide level, along with assistance in prioritizing, executing, and measuring improvement actions with a direct link to P&L outcomes. This critical visibility has been sorely missing from industry solutions for manufacturers like you.

PTC's Digital Performance Management uniquely solves an age-old problem with a breakthrough approach built on top of foundational Industry 4.0 technologies. It is informed by multiple years of experience working with thousands of leading global manufacturers to harvest and codify performance management best practices.

Get a full picture of your performance.

• ThingWorx incorporates data from systems, equipment, and tools to fully automate the performance improvement process without ripping and replacing.
• Operators and supervisors efficiently capture frontline data with a manual-driven process within the solution.

While Industry 4.0 technology has greatly matured, few companies have driven true transformational impact.

The myriad of technologies, number of potential use cases, and countless ways to affect process improvement is staggering. Lack of clarity regarding where to focus limited resources and how to ensure they drive measurable financial impact are the most significant factors governing a digital transformation progress.

Leading manufacturers let business and financial impact serve as the compass to prioritize opportunities and to focus finite resources on the most impactful problem-solving opportunities.

PTC’s Digital Performance Management is a keystone solution that helps identify, prioritize, action on, and monitor problem-solving opportunities that have the greatest potential P&L impact. It will also amplify your return on broader technology investments by ensuring technology always follows in the wake of business impact.

Amplify your problem-solving with capabilities that include:

• Predictive quality
• Asset monitoring and utilization
• A connected and augmented workforce

Digital Performance Management, our new enterprise-scale solution, allows companies to accelerate their performance improvement and drive operational excellence. The solution gives you real-time understanding of where to focus, what is causing performance issues, and where to prioritize finite resources for the most impact—line by line and site by site. You can drive improvement from the ground up, truly engaging all levels of the organization and readily achieving double-digit impact for your company.

Next steps:

• Take a proof-of-value test drive
• Chat with someone online
• Have a PTC representative contact you