We connected up with Rahul Garg, VP Industrial Machinery and SMB Program, Siemens Digital Industries Software, for a live interview during our attendance of Siemens Realize LIVE 2023. Realize LIVE brings together users, suppliers, customers, and media to discuss, innovate, and realize how digital transformation can impact our world today. Our interview with Rahul focused on Siemens© current positioning in the digital solutions space with a focus on requirements through manufacturing through support, spanning the entire product lifecycle.
I took the interview through a wide range of topics, but all with the intent of providing insight to our readers of what is available today in this space.
#NPI #ENGINEERING #BOM #CLOCKSPEED
TB – Thanks for meeting with us. Some background on me – the first 14 years of my career was with Andersen Consulting and then Accenture. Back in the 1990s this software space was Product Data Management (PDM), and evolved to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) in the late 90s, early 2000s. I was a global PLM partner for Accenture, and was fortunate enough to get exposure to the commonality of the problem set. Probably the only guy in here that has worked on 3 different PDM package installations – way back – Sherpa, Metaphase, HP WorkManager – and evaluated many others through hands-on POCs, including CMStat and MatrixOne and Pro PDM. Working with clients on how to managing information, driving accelerated NPI cycles, enabling Integrated Product Teams, identifying Configuration Items, and defining the strategies for management of the relationships between all those items was a relevant topic to all industries, and fraught with common problems.
RG – None of those problems have changed.
TB – That’s what I told my publisher. None of the context has changed. But 25 years ago, it was like crossing the chasm – being in the front of the adoption cycle – and now it doesn’t seem like pushing a boulder up a hill. It seems like its more of a steam rolling effect, more mainstream.
RG – It’s more mainstream, and companies are recognizing, like Brenda (Brenda Discher, Head of Communication, Siemens Digital Industries, and SVP Business Strategy and Marketing, Siemens Digital Industries Software) mentioned, the need for more clock speed. Getting products to market faster has never been more important. How fast can they get this done? They know the need and don’t have a choice. How fast can they get a development implementation done? How fast can they get all the things done they are envisioning?
TB – What do you think has enabled this set of capabilities (Siemens Xcelerator, cloud strategy with SaaS approach) to support clock speed? Before or “back in the day”, we were talking about speed to market and Integrated Product Teams. Just managing metadata was a big deal, and managing the associated files for an ECO, or ECN through release was a huge process – then you had to reconcile as-designed, as-built, as-shipped BOMs. What is enabling us to go through the full lifecycle now at a faster and more effective rate, across multiple companies even? Maybe this is the vision of Siemens Xcelerator.
RG – Yes. So to me, I think there are two or three reasons why that urgency is pushed over the edge now, as compared to 3 or 4 years ago. COVID was one huge factor. Everyone’s eyes opened up. “I’ve got to do something different.” COVID was the catalyst and the problems had been there. “I need to figure out how to make my products more competitive.” The only way to make them more competitive is adding more automation and adding more software into it. So its not just looking at a mechanical product, its bringing it together into a holistic view. It’s not something I can just do with spreadsheets.
One of our customers in Germany used to actually literally manage all of the I/O interfaces in a spreadsheet. They make gear grinding machines. In the gear grinding machine they make, they had something like 200 PLC control points, and every one of those control points was managed in a spreadsheet. Every time they would make a change, the spreadsheet had to be updated.
TB – And the version of that specific PLC code had to be managed along with all the other pieces.
RG – They did that for 15 years in a spreadsheet. And you can only go so far….
TB – it was a damn good spreadsheet though, let’s be honest.
RG – [Laughing]…yes, but they were so afraid that if anything was to happen…and they had 20 engineers working on different parts of that code, and they were trying to get these machines out the door faster. So how are you going to ensure all the changes made by those 20 engineers is copied into that spreadsheet so that when a machine is shipped everything is accurately comprehended by that spreadsheet and it represents the as-shipped version? Ultimately you find later on that what was shipped was something very different than the spreadsheet – and we don’t have that code anymore. It’s gone.
TB – So really the provision to accept and embrace increasing software content is one of the enablers of clock speed? Configuration management now is not just the hardware bill of material. It is across all these other systems.
RG – All the other systems. The configuration management, the disparate teams working together. Before COVID, so literally, this company I’m talking about had large engineering rooms in one facility. You could still go talk to the other guy in the other corner to get an issue sorted out. During COVID, it is like you have to make a phone call, have to create a Teams session, that whole interaction process making sure it got setup and was where it was supposed to be, and things were beginning to fall apart.
You shipped a machine and you did not know what was on the machine. Now it is setup at a customer’s site and there is a problem. So how do you fix that problem? You don’t know what is on that machine because the code that you have got is very different than what is on the machine. So it is like “How do I fix that”?
#CONFIGURATIONMANAGEMENT #SYSTEMSENGINEERING #AI #ANALYTICS
TB – These are still configuration management issues today.
RG – Yes.
TB – It hasn’t really changed except there is a recognition that you have to look at it from a systems view.
RG – A complete systems view, number one. And across the company lifecycle. The configuration is actually changing, and changing around more rapidly. Previously you worried about the configuration only during the development cycle, as you are building it. You didn’t care as much about what is happening later on. Now that the machine is in operation as well, there is a different configuration than what was setup and what was built. That machine, pointing back to the example case, has a lifecycle of 10-15 years. So now the lifecycle of that equipment has also grown a lot more and how do you make sure that all the changes have been incorporated properly.
TB – I’m assuming that your products have the ability to track what is added to the machine when it is in the field, or new software upgrades.
RG – Yes. As-designed, as-built, as-maintained, as-updated. All of that gets tracked.
TB – So think a little bit about what we talked about. What kind of provisions are being made for support in the field? What is the strategy? What are you guys envisioning? I heard audio problem logs [Ed: in one of the presentations, Siemens discussed the partnership between Microsoft Teams and Teamcenter, and how it would enable advanced in-field support capabilities].
RG – I think the only reason that Tony [Ed: Tony Hemmelgarn, CEO and President of Siemens Digital Industries Software, presented earlier in the day about the Teams and Teamcenter capability] spoke about that is to show an example of how AI is being used to capture issues.
TB – So it has a big role right? AI.
RG – It has the potential for a big role. I think we are all trying to find the right application that can be used with it. That was just an example of something they put together for Hannover Messe to show how something very simple as Teams and Microsoft are integrating with the rest of the engineering and development systems. Teams is a very simple user interface and all audio systems are a very simple interface. You can easily talk into your phone and capture the issue, and boom, it gets sent to an engineer that can solve it, and the engineer is tracking it on a physical system. So that was just a simple example. Having said that, we have a whole IoT-based solution as well that is tracking and monitoring what is going on in the background.
TB – You have analytics that are running,
RG – Absolutely.
TB – You have real-time monitoring that is taking place.
RG – Exactly.
#DIGITAL TWIN #PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE #DATA PRIVACY
TB – In the field this is not a design digital twin this is something different.
RG – An operational digital twin. In this operational digital twin we have the ability to monitor any type of parameter you want from temperature to vibration to noise. All pre-indicators to potential problems. For instance, if there is some noise that is going to lead to some vibration which is then going to lead to some temperature impact. The moment you sense some vibration, you know it’s going to lead to some temperature impact as well. And that temperature is going to lead to something not working right. It is going to heat up and it’s going to break.
William Strickland [Publisher] – So now you are catching it ahead of time. In real-time.
RG – You got it.
TB – You can look at trends to determine where the system is headed. This is similar to the function of a JV between Accenture and GE focused on aircraft prognostics for jets, that analyzed QAR files from airplanes to get tail number, model, and fleet-based trends. Predictive diagnostics. I see predictive maintenance everywhere now though, it isn’t new anymore.
RG – It’s not new anymore. The challenge is the adoption curve. How quickly can you get it to be used by the industry, and just the challenges of operational level details. The technology is there. Now, how do you operationalize it? A simple example in a lot of the capabilities that we talked about, so many of our customers on the industrial machinery side many times don’t sell the equipment directly to the end user. There are distributors in-between as well. These distributors are also the ones providing a lot of the service.
TB – So they are kind of like a Value-Added Reseller (VAR)?
RG – Exactly a VAR. And they are local service guys. If something breaks down you need someone who is going to come in and change that code or change that belt, whatever may be the case. That guy needs to be informed as well. And the OEM needs to be informed, the guy who made the equipment. And then the end-user is concerned as well. “wait a second, I don’t want to have all my data going to all these different companies on how I am using this machine, what I’m actually doing with it..” Those are some of the operational level concerns that people are still trying to work through.
You know one of our customers they actually make industrial water pumps and those industrial water pumps are used by cities and by governments in some cases to get water out of lakes and wells or wherever there source, and push them in different networks. So these are massive industrial pumps. The cities are not willing to share that data easily because of security and regulatory concerns and approval authority. Who has the approval authority to say, “yep, all this data we have, as the mayor I can go give it to this other company.” And who has the authority to buy this? Who knows what customer data, what privacy or security issues I need to sort through. The citizens of the city have not approved sharing their information about how their water usage is happening today, with some pump manufacturers.
#SIEMENSXCELERATOR #SYSTEMSDESIGN #VERTICALSOLUTIONS
TB – I’m going to shift gears. I want to talk about Siemens Xcelerator for a little bit. As complexity of products increase, and software content increases, and new business models crop up, the entire requirements management piece becomes more urgent and important, yet in the past it has been broken. Where is Siemens on addressing requirements flow down and how do you track against requirements?
RG – Yes, Tony briefly touched upon it, and you are going to hear a lot more about it tomorrow [Day 2 of RealizeLIVE], about the whole concept of model-based systems development. The idea behind that model-based systems development approach is you start up front with a requirements process…and make sure you capture all of the requirements.
TB – And they’re indexed! [both laughing]
RG – Actually in our systems they are broken up into objects. Those requirements objects can then feed the rest of the development process. If you design for an electrical requirement, and this product needs to go to Brazil, you have to have an electrical requirement for Brazil which is very different than an electrical requirement in for instance the United States.
TB – So the object inheritance means I can have an electrical requirement at the top level, then my instances for Brazil electrical requirement or United States electrical requirement can be slightly different, but still inherit the overall electrical design requirement. It is an object-oriented approach.
RG – You got it. That electrical requirement now is to shift all of the wiring to support the 220 requirements of Brazil, will drive not not just the electrical wiring requirements but even the routing of those wires because they may need to be routed differently. Motors will need to change, it’s just not the wiring. The motor driving the product will need to change. Who is going to design that motor now? When it comes in it’s going to have some different specifications. It may have different size and dimension specifications. Those size and dimension specifications will require the Mechanical Engineer, who is creating the mounting points for that motor, to look at that motor differently. Maybe it is the same, we do not know, but at least they will need to look at it. Essentially that one requirement for electrical will phase down to all these different people, as to how that one requirement is going to lead to some different specifications on the mechanical side, on the electrical side. And based on that determining how the performance will be changing. What is the torque we are going to get in this new motor and is it sufficient for what these guys are trying to do, because the parts they are going to make are going to be of some different or new steel quality? All of that will need to be traced through the product life cycle.
TB – Including the testing that ties back and confirms everything right?
RG – That’s right. And we have a very, very strong approach to that. We are recognizing that this needs to be adopted more extensively across industries. I would say in the past this approach was led primarily by the Aerospace industry because of their regulatory requirements being so strong. They had to make sure that the regulatory requirements are well captured, documented, and those requirements are well fed to the rest of the process. We have been working with many of the defense and aerospace companies and that is getting us to a view that these same challenges are there in other industries.
TB – Healthcare is a great example. You have to keep track of a Device Manufacturing Record for instance. I guess they call it that now, a DMR. An FDA requirement when you build out a device. If you have good requirements tracking your are half-way home.
RG – This something that we have put a lot of focus on as a company, and there is a complete process behind it.
TB – So I’m trying to understand where Siemens Xcelerator fits in this. Is it kind of the backbone for the data management and transactional sharing, maybe even workflow – although Teamcenter is probably the workflow….
RG – Let me try and simplify it.
TB – Is it the glue that everything external can plug into?
RG – Exactly. It’s not just external but internal as well.
TB – When I was doing stuff for Raytheon way back as a consultant, they had this concept of an Object Request Broker. Is that what Siemens Xcelerator is? Is it kind of like that?
RG – It’s not going down to the object request broker, but the intent is to make that glue work inside the applications. Teamcenter is the object request broker, what is providing that back-end integration process. This portfolio of capabilities, portfolio of solutions, portfolio of technologies, that’s what we call Siemens Xcelerator.
TB – Everything that “sits” on top? Like one level above the operating system?
RG – Yes, it’s at the application level.
TB – I wrote some iPhone apps and was just trying to put that into perspective.
RG – Sure. It’s the glue to bring all the apps together.
TB – The common requests, the common data, the commonality of how apps get what they want, and then the framework or structure that actually helps these things talk to each other, and allows these things to “talk” to each other.
RG – It is becoming more important in the Cloud and SaaS work. We are in the process of transitioning a lot of our applications which are running on the desktop in an independent mode, and getting them to work in the Cloud.
#SMBVALUEPROPOSTION #SINGLEVENDORSOLUTIONS #INTEROPERABILITY
TB – So the SMB space, small-medium business space, what is the value proposition for SMB? From my perspective this allows a company or person to “plug-in” and become part of a team, or part of a collaborative network where they couldn’t do that before.
RG – There are multiple things in the SMB space which we are doing, which is already making it very easy for small and medium sized companies to start adopting our technology. I will give you an example. Number 1 is this cloud-based portfolio of capabilities, which makes it very easy to use without having to invest a lot of money up front.
TB – The subscription model?
RG – Yes, the subscription model. It makes it very easy for the SMB space. Keep adding users and only pay by the month or by the year. This allows a company to move along as its operational needs grow. Number 2, the big thing is we are seeing more and more of is the SMB companies would rather deal with one vendor versus many, many vendors and having to buy through many, many different people. Siemens is probably the only company that has all of the necessary capabilities under one “roof.” It makes it so much easier for them because a larger enterprise company can buy more technologies from different independent entities and work through the process of bringing all of those integrations together.
TB – Interoperability issues are a huge challenge.
RG – Huge. As an SMB company, you don’t have to worry about that when you start working with Siemens, because we have already done that integration. We have already built those capabilities. The SMB company just starts figuring out how and when to start using those different capabilities. To me that is a big factor, having one single vendor. And areas where we do not have capabilities, we have done a lot of partnerships. Tony spoke about one of them today, IBM, where they are making some capabilities that we do not have. We have built those necessary integrations so you as a customer don’t need to worry about how you are going to bring that capability in. One of the other partners he did not talk about was Salesforce.com. Salesforce has a big CRM solution. We have built an integration between our PLM systems and Salesforce. So as an independent company, if you are trying to manage your design information for a specific customer, and you are trying to manage all your customer relationship information in Salesforce, now you can see them all together.
TB – Just based on a serial number someone provides?
RG – Exactly.
TB – That is fantastic.
RG – To me I think from an SMB perspective there are a lot of things we are doing that make it very easy for smaller sized companies to start adopting our solutions. We are also industrializing our solution. For example…
TB – Security?
RG – Security and cybersecurity is something we have baked into our core processes. When I say industrialize the word I should have probably used was “verticalized.” The needs of the medical industry versus an aerospace company versus an automotive company. We are tailoring the solution to the specific needs of that industry. There is a lot of work we have already done in that regard, and we continue to work on that. We have specific solutions for medical companies, we have specific solutions for machining companies, even for automotive suppliers, and for aerospace suppliers. It enables an easier transition for those companies when they are able to say this is already the best practice and all these companies in this space are already using it, so I might as well use this instead of figuring out how I should do this. It has been tried, it has been tested, it has been developed, let me start using it.
The adoption curve is greatly reduced. The best practices are already built in there. The processes are already built in there. Start using this process it works. For the 15-25 years of experiences that we have had in industry, now we have incorporated that into our SaaS solutions so it makes it very easy for them to start getting ready and getting online very quickly. Which is what SMB companies want right? They don’t want the headache of trying to go learn…
TB – They don’t have an IT shop. Most don’t have a CIO with a staff where they can go and build all these extensible connections. They need to get stuff done. GSD.
RG – Exactly. That’s a good one.
TB – Thanks Rahul for your time. You hit all of your topic areas, and we appreciate speaking with you.
