Digitalization is affecting every industry, disrupting current leaders and creating new business opportunities. To survive disruption, manufacturers must rethink every aspect of their business, become a digital enterprise, and take advantage of the new and disruptive technology drivers across each phase of their operation to reduce cycle time, increase yield and create new business opportunities. This is the only feasible way to deal with constantly increasing complexity in products and manufacturing enterprises. The primary reason that a company’s digital endeavors struggle to deliver the greatest benefits is their inability to develop a digital strategy that crosses all parts of their product processes.

Successful transformation requires an end-to-end digital innovation strategy to create comprehensive and precise digital models of products and production operations as a means to manage the complexity of smart products and smart production operations. These digital twins provide detailed insight into all aspects of decision making for product development and production operations to the IoT performance insight gained from products and plants in operation. Only then – by connecting these digital twins with a consistent digital thread – can companies realize the power and flexibility to speed up development, optimize manufacturing and use the insight gained from product and plant operations to improve future performance.