SOFTWARE UPDATE
on how products are designed, but more importantly, how people experience those products when they’re in use. ME: How important is partnering with other companies for IoT technologies and developments? Heppelmann: It’s actually hyper-important. We’ve actu- ally invested in a marketplace, in the community, to facilitate that. We always say that ‘IoT is a team sport.’ It’s unlikely that any one vendor is going to supply a complete solution to the customer for their set of concerns, whether you look at cloud companies like Amazon, or technologies like Splunk that allow that data to be analyzed and consumed. Being able to have an ecosystem that comes together to deliver the full breadth of potential opportunities that a customer wants to pursue is mandatory. ME: What companies have joined PTC in IoT develop- ments? Could you briefly describe a few of these efforts? Heppelmann: GE is aggressively pursuing the Internet of Things, and GE is using some of PTC’s technology in their Brilliant Manufacturing strategy. Many of the applications that they are developing are being developed with the ThingWorx technology inside. Other examples are new startups, like a customer of ours, OnFarm, that’s using our technology to integrate irrigation, soil and machine equipment data to drive increased yield and productivity to farmers in California. ME: What are some of the key IoT developments PTC
introduced at the LiveWorx 2016 in June? Heppelmann: At LiveWorx, we unveiled Vuforia Studio, which allows our customers and customers with other CAD to be able to leverage that CAD technology. They do this in a highly scalable way to build augmented reality-based applications using their 3D content, mirroring the virtual and physical world of the products they design with the actual products that are out in the field. It gives them the ability to quickly build augmented-reality-based applications enabling a whole new realm of experiences. That’s one I think is very exciting for the potential it has for how people interact with the physical and the digital world. For me personally, at Live- Worx we also announced some pretty exciting role-based applications that we call PTC Navigate for the manufacturing floor. These are solutions for production managers and su- pervisors that give them real-time operational visibility, a 360° view of their operation. These include role-based applications for maintenance teams that allow them to monitor, act and do diagnostics on the assets that they’re responsible for, and for operators, it gives them a single environment from which they can see and execute all of their work.
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AdvancedManufacturing.org | August 2016
ME: What can some of these technologies offers users to build their IoT applications? Heppelmann: Ultimately in the world of software anything can be developed, if you have enough time and resources to do so. What is very special about IoT platforms like the Thing- Worx IoT platform PTC offers is the significant compression of time taken to build applications. With augmented reality, users are able to develop an application in literally minutes versus weeks, by being able to use that 3D data and adorn it with the kinds of augmented reality experiences someone wants, and then publish that as an application. The platform itself enables customers to very quickly develop applications, and then to very quickly be able to continue and innovate to evolve those applications. And the real special sauce here is being able to do it in a magnitude of improvement that is 10× or greater. ME: What challenges can manufacturers address or
resolve by implementing IoT solutions? Heppelmann: One that is near and dear to my heart, given that I am looking at solutions in the factory, is being able to move from reports that one is reading from yesterday or last week about what happened in the factory, to being able to monitor and react in real time. This gives the operational folks in a factory a tremendous advantage over what is historically avail- able, by being able to have a 360° instant-now view of what’s happening. And the importance of that is then they can make faster and better decisions and react and correct things as problems may be occurring or, better yet, as they’re developing. ME: Describe some recent successes PTC customers, such as GE or others, have had in IoT manufacturing. Heppelmann: GE’s been a longtime fabulous customer of PTC, but about 15 months ago or so we embarked together on some proof-of-concept within a couple of GE factories. And what they found initially is just by using the ThingWorx technology to rapidly connect to machines in one particular facility, and then to serve that real-time connectivity up to the management team on the line or in the factory, they were actu- ally able to better understand machine utilization and when there was unplanned downtime. GE talks about their trans- portation facility achieving a 10–20% reduction in unplanned downtime. Now they have many different lines so that variabil- ity is dependent on the various lines. We also work with a Fortune 50 food and beverage com- pany that has implemented this technology in the factory at a very broad level, achieving about a 5–8% productivity improve- ment per factory. Another interesting case study is a very large aerospace company that has used IoT in the concept of smart
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