Enable Digital Innovation and Agility with Product Life Cycle Management on AWS Cloud

AWS for Industrial – Engineering and Design

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the management of processes, data, technology, and methods across the creation and usage of a product. Typically, there are four stages in the product lifecycle process consisting of design, development, manufacturing, and usage. The product lifecycle touches many departments including engineering, marketing, and interactions with the production environments. Each department may have its own data or templates and this can create multiple silos of information under each area. The use of PLM system helps to standardize development methods, improve communication, and enhance collaboration, resulting in a more streamlined design workflow and ultimately faster time to market of new products and features. PLM software is used to not only track product designs and changes, but it also creates a central place to keep all product data and documents across the multiple teams. This helps companies standardize, secure, and share knowledge across the product development lifecycle.

Research and Development (R&D) is at the heart of innovation at most manufacturers and with market pressure to deliver increasingly complex systems faster, businesses are exploring new methods to keep pace and unlock new revenue streams. Adding to the already increasing market pressure, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated rapid adoption of digital technologies for manufacturers and triggered a re-evaluation on how to best support a collaborative design process. Per a recent survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, the world has vaulted five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption in a matter of eight weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic. This means that companies had to figure out a way to enable their product design and collaboration at a time when their employees were not able to go to their traditional work locations and may have been forced to work remotely. A solution to mitigate R&D challenges is to migrate the PLM system to the cloud.

Traditional on-premises PLM systems are barely keeping up with existing product development work streams due to the traditional R&D infrastructure and many complex integrations. This on-premises based infrastructure has proven to be inflexible, often poorly utilized, and managed over a multi-year lifecycle. According to CIMdata report on Cloud PLM, across the manufacturing Industry today, 50% of the industrial firms have been using their current PLM for over 5 years and while 22% of them have been using their system for 10 years or greater.  Migrations are challenging as service interruption must be minimized and the new implementation must be instituted in a way that has zero data loss and minimal downtime. Furthermore, there are often multiple layers of application systems that are built on top of PLM system that interface with other critical systems. For those manufacturers whose business is dependent on PLM, the prospect of migration and product version upgrades has been a daunting challenge.

Industrial companies look to migrate or modernize their PLM systems primarily to address three common challenges. First, to reduce product development cost and cycle time by enabling concurrent design and remote collaboration, and by identifying design reuse opportunities. Second, to respond to regulatory and/or market conditions, and implement agile techniques to improve development, due to changing market and customer requirements. Lastly, to ensure design-production quality by reducing production variation and design deviations and enable digital continuity for business transformation with a highly available with resilient data store.

We are seeing companies around the world leveraging cloud for their PLM workload to accelerate the product development cycle time and ensure end-to-end digital continuity to transform business. PLM workloads on AWS cloud not only enables customers to have greater agility, but more importantly enhance their security posture and greatly reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by leveraging advanced networking, compute, storage, and managed database services. For example, Infosys helped Carrier Global Corporation migrate PTC Windchill PLM workloads to AWS that greatly enhanced the business value delivered by AWS, including operational security, reliability, performance, and cost.

Figure 1 shows a high-level overview of the relevant services and benefits with operating PLM in the cloud. Apart from lift-and-shift of PLM systems from on-premises to AWS, modernizing PLM platforms and integrating it with associated cloud-based CAD and CAE tools bring many advantages to manufacturers in the areas of agile engineering, collaborative design, and intelligent products design capabilities. AWS provides many fully-managed and cost-effective services to meet customer’s automation, compute, database, and networking needs. Specifically, PLM modernization on AWS enables flexible and scalable infrastructure to accommodate varying user loads, provide low latency access with the use of advanced networking services, and provide replication PLM servers in AWS regions that are located nearer to global design centers. Furthermore, automation using AWS infrastructure automation provides a consistent way of deploying systems for staging, testing, development, and production needs. AWS also provides best practice guidance in the form of reference architecture, such as PTC Windchill PLM deployment on AWS or Siemens Teamcenter PLM on AWS. Customers can use this guidance for a consistent and efficient deployment and operation. Additionally, AWS provides fully managed AWS services for file vault and database needs, advanced security controls that caters to specific industry and regional requirement, such as with Gov Cloud, and finally help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase performance by leveraging advanced EC2 instance types, such as Graviton and m6i processors.

There are many industrial companies who have successfully migrated their PLM systems to the cloud and reaped the benefits. Rivian is compelling customer story, they realized that their on-premises hosting their PLM, CAD, and CAE workloads could not keep up with their performance needs. On AWS, Rivian was able to improve the speed of their software tools by up to 66% and could load a full vehicle bill of materials in just 22 minutes. It has also enabled collaboration through shared storage and improved availability of compute resources.

Public sector and regulated industries can take advantage of security mechanisms and associated certifications available in the cloud. This allows such organizations to meet their cybersecurity requirements, and achieve better uptime, performance and scalability of their PLM applications.

PLM in the cloud can be a powerful tool to drive digital transformation across the enterprise. While lift-and-shift is certainly one approach, companies like Siemens and PTC are also modernizing their PLM solutions in the cloud. These solutions leverage well-architected best practices and help companies innovate faster.

Visit AWS for Industrial page to learn more about Product Lifecycle Management on AWS.