“Digital transformation” may be the latest industry buzzword. The Big Four CAD vendors (Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, PTC, Siemens) and other software vendors insist every manufacturer needs to undergo a digital transformation, and in doing so, will gain a competitive advantage since it’s still the early days of digital transformation adoption. But ignore the need for a digital transformation for too long and your company will be hopelessly left behind.
But what exactly is a digital transformation? Perhaps your company is already undergoing a digital transformation at its own speed and in its own way, and not even know it is transforming according to what has been prescribed by the technology vendors. Maybe a digital transformation is just a “hurry up” from technology vendors who are growing impatient for its adoption?
It would not be the first time software companies have coined a term for products they sell. Computer aided design, computer aided manufacturing and computer aided engineering (now more commonly called simulation) were offered by software companies as solutions for problems manufacturing companies did not know they had. CAD, CAM and CAE are now commonly accepted as genuine needs. CAD, CAE and CAM were followed by PLM -- at least by by Dassault Systèmes, PTC and Siemens. Autodesk held out, declaring as late as the Carl Bass era, that PLM was not really a thing.
“The only people who need PLM are the ones selling PLM,” Bass quotes in Kenneth Wong’s record along with “PLM is a solution in search of a problem.”
Digital transformation, however, is in more need of definition than CAD, CAM, CAE and PLM – if only because there is no single software application to supply it. It still floats into a conversation as vague concept, but one that demands that you, if you are at all tech savvy, should know about it.
Autodesk, a vendor serious about digital transformation, convened a Who’s Who of industry consultants to make the concept clearer at their Accelerate 2022 conference. Onstage and on the spot, the consultants valiantly attempted to agree on a definition of a digital transformation, on its need and on its implementation.
It would have been nice if they would have established milestones so companies could judge how complete was their own digital transformation, but this was only an hour-long discussion. This was not a formal standards committee. And, let’s face it: a Autodesk conference was hardly the place to quibble about the necessity for a digital transformation when your host has requested that you discuss its merits.
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Posted by: Bob Rapier | August 26, 2022 at 10:58 PM