PLM<\/a>,\u201d said Jonathan Cooper, Rolls-Royce group head enterprise systems & digital strategy on stage. \u201cWe thought that was technology differentiating for us. It\u2019s not. It\u2019s a huge barrier.<\/p>\n\u201cWhat that did then is it drove us to creating all of our innovation in little silos, so it\u2019s fantastic innovation solvers that we\u2019ve created ourselves that are bespoke for our capability, but those solvers and data are locked into, in some cases, machines on desktops, and you can\u2019t share that data and then realise that benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cooper describes this as Rolls-Royce\u2019s \u2018tech debt\u2019 \u2013 putting a lot of load onto their IT organisation due to the number for bespoke apps interwoven into their business that hold them back from moving to a better position.<\/p>\n
A world away<\/p>\n
Rolls-Royce\u2019s solution is to create a \u2018parallel universe\u2019 with Siemens and Microsoft and other partners, where \u201call of the hard stuff\u201d can be fixed. And at the heart of this is going to be the software of Siemens Digital Industries portfolio \u2013 Designcenter, Teamcenter, Opscenter and Intelligence Center X.<\/p>\n
Cooper says this will make the organisation future ready, not only so it can move to the proposed two updates from Siemens to maintain the latest standard, but as a cultural change as well. \u201cAt the moment, if I change anything on my estate, my engineers are slow to culturally take it, because they\u2019re not used to updates.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like an update that drops onto your phone, and you just go, \u2018oh, it\u2019s a new functionality, great, I\u2019ll carry on\u2019. There\u2019s always a learning process, so we have to change our culture to get it out of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moving forward<\/p>\n
The first thing that has happened is that Rolls-Royce has removed all its users from its mainframe and turned it off. \u201cA massive piece of work for us,\u201d admits Cooper. \u201cIt\u2019s been a painful, painful dance with lots of stepping on toes, but we\u2019ve got there \u2013 so that gets our bill-of-material and positioning team tools to where we can then release to use all that future capability.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next step is the rollout of Teamcenter and Opcenter in the cloud \u2013 beginning with Opcenter in its internal assembly plants before adding in Teamcenter. The last step will be moving quality management into Teamcenter from an old, \u2018fragile\u2019 version of SAP, which frees them to then make upgrades to SAP and more.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is us really making that step to: I want to go to what just comes out of the box from the industry. I don\u2019t want to customise now, while I\u2019m doing all that on the background, and we\u2019re really pushing the IT team and doing the hard work.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of the engineers and manufacturing engineers are having great fun at this parallel world that we\u2019re creating.<\/p>\n
Cooper adds that with Microsoft, Rolls-Royce is building out Teamcenter on the cloud, and then a waterfall of apps that it wants to containerise and put in the cloud. That will eventually end up in us releasing our future engineering environment to the team this year,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
The first things to be put in that environment will be MBSE enablement with Capella.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we are going as a group to move to Ply [a no-code software platform that allows teams to build custom features and automated workflows directly into the apps they already use],\u201d continues Cooper. \u201cWhat that does is it then allows me to do the what I call the AI enablement piece. I can use all of the built-in resident AI capability within all those tools that I\u2019ve just put on the cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n
The AI upgrade<\/p>\n
Here, Cooper says, is where the exciting part happens: the integration of AI enablement with Siemens Intelligence Center X.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe beauty with Intelligence Center [is] we can add then into that our data lakes and AI capability that we have in house, so we have our Air Factory and Air Foundry, and we also agree very heavily on Databricks, and we can directly integrate that.\u201d<\/p>\n
From this setup, he says, Rolls-Royce will be able to use Siemens Intelligence Center X to then create its data fabric, gain meaningful understanding and identify key drivers of capability and efficiency.<\/p>\n
Key to this is Mendix and its low code abilities \u2013 which immediately means they are not tied to external consultant coders. \u201cI can use Mendix to top and tail and say, \u2018Teamcenter, I want you to give me two more parameters\u2019, and then you see it come up through IntelligenceCenter X and visualise.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe must focus on de-customisation. Customisation is the enemy in this respect, and we must make sure that when we are using this data, we really invest in Mendix as a tool, because Mendix will really be what allows you to surface those insights if those insights are hidden in an enterprise system,\u201d Cooper says, concluding the presentation with the notion of real power is that every user is capable of surfacing their own insight. \u201cBecause the reality is the people that own the problem and who are trying to solve that problem are the ones that are going to realise the insight at the point where it arrives.\u201d<\/p>\n
The shift to a full end-to-end digital thread is a challenge even for a company of RollsRoyce\u2019s capabilities, but there are signs that a coherent path is being forged.<\/p>\n
This presentation formed part of the Siemens Realize Live event in Amsterdam. Stay tuned for our full event report \u2013 which will feature in the upcoming issue of DEVELOP3D Magazine. Get updates here<\/a>.<\/p>\nRelated articles: <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How Rolls-Royce is shifting to the latest out-of-the-box software and low-code tools to tackle the tech debt placed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21002],"tags":[41392,28233,41393,30325,6487,41394],"class_list":["post-50624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-siemens","tag-designcenter","tag-intelligence-center-x","tag-realize-live","tag-rolls-royce","tag-siemens","tag-teamcenter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}