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Digital Transformation (DX) is a broad business strategy to solve traditional business challenges and create new disruptive opportunities using digital technology – such as maximize revenue, reduce cost, improve quality, and increase flexibility. Use cases range from asset optimization to workforce productivity to industrialization.

Why Manufacturers Need Digital Transformation

To remain competitive, DX for manufacturers is a necessity. Global market intelligence firm IDC predicts that in 2025 global DX spend among manufacturing industry companies will total more than $816 billion. Forrester Consulting found that more than 90% of manufacturing leaders believe that DX is important for their success. Clearly there is a lot at stake and developing a DX strategy is critical to capturing the most value.

The range of opportunities for DX in manufacturing is both a positive and negative. On the one hand, for whatever challenges facing an organization, there is likely a solution out there to address it. But manufacturers are faced with dozens of challenges. Such initiatives are usually driven by a scattergun, technology-driven approach. Ultimately, this results in resources being misdirected and just a small set of initiatives driving true transformation. Instead, companies must employ a laser-focused approach, that emphasizes impact, speed, and scale.

Manufacturers that have successfully adopted DX strategies are more efficient than their competition. That efficiency may be generated by greater worker productivity, asset uptime, better cross-organizational collaboration, or other DX opportunities. Ultimately, regardless of how efficiency is gained, it can be leveraged to increase revenue and/or reduce costs.

Achieving Transformation with Impact, Speed, and Scale

Regardless of the many different challenges an organization faces and the many different solutions on the market, there are fundamentally four objectives for manufacturers that have not changed: maximize revenue, reduce cost, improve quality, and increase flexibility. Impact, speed, and scale are the three key success factors for delivering transformational outcomes, and each must be tied to at least one of the objectives. Here’s how:

Impact – Focus resources on the most important constraints to drive P&L. Based on the dynamics of an industry and strategic roadmap, manufacturers should determine which of the fundamental goals are most important to improve upon and which are most likely to impact these goals in order of their criticality to the business.

Speed – With impactful opportunities identified, attention should turn to speed and scale. Quick wins can make or break a good initiative by building early, positive momentum. A quick win will generate team buy-in and can be leveraged for greater executive support. This rapid time to initial value is best achieved with proven off-the-shelf solutions.

Scale – Scalability must be considered early. No initiative should take place without a comprehensive and actionable scaling plan. If a project is slow to scale it is more likely to lose support and fold. If it cannot scale, then it is not delivering transformational value. The most reliable way to build a scalable plan is to model it after approaches that have already proven to be successful. The key here is finding repeatable use cases, that check off the high impact requirement and can be deployed with off-the-shelf solutions.

Final Thoughts

A recent PTC survey found that there is a stark difference between the companies that succeed in DX and those that do not. Companies that meet ROI goals expectations beat them by an average of 50%; those that fail miss expectations by an average of 30%.

This insight underscores the requirement for strategic DX for manufacturing organizations, and the PTC Impact, Speed, and Value Framework described here creates a foundation for DX success.

Will Hastings is Director of Product Marketing, PLM for PTC.