At Realize LIVE Americas Day 3, the event continued with a full day of sessions for the assembled community. Once again, the day started with a general session that brought customer stories to the mainstage, focusing on how they are using Siemens technologies to achieve their digital transformation at scale.
The opening general session for day 3 saw Ray Kok, CEO of Siemens’ low-code platform business, Mendix, joined by Kevin Ferreira, IT Manager at Jabil, a large-scale contract manufacturer serving over 400 unique and diverse customers with everything from mobile phones and coffee machines to lifesaving healthcare diagnostic equipment and automotive safety technology. As Ferreira explained, “You may not know the name, Jabil. And that's cool with us. But you absolutely know our customers and the products we help them bring to market.” Ferreira leads Jabil’s global Low-Code Center of Excellence and detailed the journey his organization has been on to help address the challenges it faced across its business – and how it has worked to become a composable enterprise.
Ray Kok is joined by Kevin Ferreira, IT Manager at Jabil, who leads its global Low-Code Center of Excellence.
As Ferreira explained, Jabil was missing opportunities for innovation due to a bottleneck in its IT team to deliver the capabilities and integrations its manufacturing sites needed. “We had opportunities. Looking at the traditional development process, we had technical debt - six to 12 months lead time for one product – and that wasn't matching our operational needs, customer needs and the requirements. Some of the products had a 100-year backlog. That number sounds made up it sounds insane, but it's true. One product at a time, operations can barely wait 100 minutes a day. So, what's the solution? How do we take this forward? Well, leadership at Jabil had an idea - low code.” And this is where Jabil turned to Mendix. Ferreira detailed the organization’s journey to rapidly scale its use of low-code apps and deliver the capabilities its teams need, in the time frames that innovation demands – delivering 48 custom apps to solve immediate business challenges.
As Ferreira concluded, “Final thoughts were the challenge from operations - faster delivery, faster speeds with reduced costs and delivered 94% of projects on time. We're actually 100% on or under budget. And then there’s $10 million cost avoidance.”
Next up on the general session stage was Apryl MacLane, PLM Project Manager at NAVAIR (Naval Air Systems Command) who told the story of how she is focusing on building the first NAVAIR sustainable digital baseline with 100% asset visibility throughout the entire lifecycle. As MacLane explained, “A digital baseline means we need to capture everything that we build in the development lifecycle of our programs. And we need to be able to create a digital engineering that accurately reflects the changes that are being made throughout the lifecycle of this program.” To help with this mammoth task, NAVAIR has turned to Teamcenter for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Service Lifecycle Management (SLM).
As she explained “When we collected the F18 aircraft, we got one configuration from our OEM, we had hundreds of airplanes that came off that assembly line - and they were all different. So, we knew that we needed to be able to capture actual configurations. Traditionally, we don't do that. Traditionally, we've always been playing catch up. So, what this offers us to do is it offers us the ability to capture all of the data that we need at the beginning of the lifecycle - and manage it forever.”
How did NAVAIR accomplish this? NAVAIR created an aggregate digital twin that reflects change management and completes its digital baseline. Then it determined that PLM could help it create that initial digital baseline and Service Lifecycle Management capabilities in Teamcenter can help it manage its changes. Teamcenter PLM provides an engineering digital ecosystem and helps it to manage a complete digital thread of service-related information that will manage the processes that it needs to optimize services and asset availability. The end result is cost savings driven by reuse, because instead of bending metal and making things, NAVAIR can digitally construct an aircraft and see if the change that it wants to make is going to be effective digitally.
The results of the ongoing project are impressive. As MacLane detailed, “Today, we have three digital twin aircraft configured in the Navy's PLM system. We call those bill-of-materials and they are available right now in our development environment. We're using Service Lifecycle Management to maintain the configuration of those baselines. We want aircraft that are readily available to do the mission that they need to do through PLM. And through SLM, we can manage that inventory and those decisions. Plus, it gives us actionable digital datasets for additive manufacturing, and machine learning.
MacLane concluded “The bottom line is, historically, it has taken us way too much time to build our aircraft. It costs us a lot of money and we don't have the reuse that we need - we start from scratch every single time and we didn't capture what was happening. Now with this technology, and these tools, digital engineering is a reality for us. Benefits of digital engineering for us are that it's going to give us that PLM configuration management that we so need, it's going to eliminate manual transformation of information between departments and across systems, and time-consuming errors, it's going to help us reduce multiple sources.”
Techcellence Awards - Celebrating the pioneers in our community
This year at Realize LIVE, Siemens presented Techcellence awards for the first time.
This year’s Realize LIVE introduced a new initiative to recognize companies that are striving for change through transformation and sustainability, as well as individuals who are leading through innovation and acting as a champion for digital technology and sharing their knowledge with the Siemens community. Read this announcement to learn more about the winners that were presented with their awards at the end of the general session. They each receive a VIP experience this year and were awarded VIP attendance passes for Realize LIVE 2025, which will move to Detroit and take place June 2 – 5, 2025.
Showcasing our customers’ success
Elsewhere at the event, we’re sharing other customer stories – as attendees entered the Solution Center at Realize LIVE, they were greeted with a variety of experiences, among which are the customer success story booths. Here, they have the chance to hear from customers like Nemo’s Garden, Sony, Blendhub and more. While each customer's story is unique, they all share a common thread - Siemens' solutions have played a pivotal role in their success.
Take Sony, for example - attendees at the booth not only heard Sony’s story of implementing Siemens' NX software but also got to experience it firsthand as the booth leads walked them through using Siemens' NX Immersive Designer for simulation, engineering and design. This immersive experience was one-of-a-kind for attendees since the headset isn’t set to launch until the end of 2024.
Drumroll please…
Yesterday our 2024 Student Sustainability Design Hack came to a close as we crowned Karandeep Singh and Matt Moulds from Seneca Polytechnic as our champions!
The student teams had 48 hours to produce and present their design solution to Andretti Global. Yesterday, the teams presented to a panel of judges, and were evaluated on sustainability, feasibility, business value and innovation, among other criteria.
The purpose of the Design Hack is to address the needs of the Andretti Team while helping students to understand the impact sustainability has during each step of design and production. They did so by using sustainability tools within NX to redesign the scaling process to increase efficiency.
Congrats to our winners and participants, we can’t wait to see what next year’s challenge is!
Where next for Realize LIVE?
The next stop on our community events is Realize LIVE Europe, held next month, June 3 – 5 in Munich, then Shanghai for Realize LIVE Greater China July 24 –25. For attendees at this week’s event, the content will be available to watch on demand in the coming weeks, enabling them to catch up on any of the 300 sessions they might have missed. Siemens is incredibly proud of the work that goes into its Realize LIVE event and much of that is driven by our amazing community of customers, experts, partners, sponsors, leaders and pioneers that show up, share their knowledge, best practice and expertise to help build this thriving community.
Realize LIVE Americas promised to be the place “Where digital transformation gets real. Fast” and over 2,000 attendees experienced this firsthand. They visited the show-floor that brought more customer stories, direct access to subject matter experts and partners, got to deep dive into the product roadmaps and learned best practices from the Siemens’ team and their peers. Realize LIVE Americas has demonstrated Siemens’ vision of how digital transformation, when combined with the AI revolution, is changing how manufacturers are going to innovate now, and in the future, to help build a more sustainable world.
