Modernizing Product Lifecycle Management on AWS

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the management of processes, data, technology, and methods across the creation and usage of a product. Typically, there are four stages in the product lifecycle process consisting of design, development, manufacturing, and usage. The product lifecycle touches many departments including engineering, marketing, and interactions with the production environments. Each department may have its own data or templates, and this can create multiple silos of information under each area. The use of PLM system helps to standardize development methods, improve communication, and enhance collaboration, resulting in a more streamlined design workflow and ultimately faster time to market of new products and features. PLM software is used to not only track product designs and changes, but it also creates a central place to keep all product data and documents across the multiple teams. This helps companies standardize, secure, and share knowledge across the product development lifecycle.

Traditional on-premises PLM systems are barely keeping up with existing product development work streams due to the traditional R&D infrastructure and many complex integrations. This on-premises based infrastructure has proven to be inflexible, often poorly utilized, and managed over a multi-year lifecycle. The latest Cloud PLM adoption trends point to accelerating growth amongst manufacturers. According to the 2022 Tech-Clarity Cloud PLM study, Manufacturers' preference for cloud-based solutions increased dramatically from 2018 to 2022, with only 17% of companies favoring the cloud in 2018 compared to approximately 75% preferring the cloud by 2022. The data indicates that implementation of cloud-based PLM is on the rise across the industry. As more manufacturers switch to cloud-based systems, Migrations are challenging as service interruption must be minimized and the new implementation must be instituted in a way that has zero data loss and minimal downtime. Furthermore, there are often multiple layers of application systems that are built on top of PLM system that interface with other critical systems. For those manufacturers whose business is dependent on PLM, the prospect of migration and product version upgrades has been a daunting challenge.

Industrial companies look to migrate or modernize their PLM systems primarily to address three common challenges. First, to reduce product development cost and cycle time by enabling concurrent design and remote collaboration, and by identifying design reuse opportunities. Second, to respond to regulatory and/or market conditions, and implement agile techniques to improve development, due to changing market and customer requirements. Lastly, to ensure design-production quality by reducing production variation and design deviations and enable digital continuity for business transformation with a highly available with resilient data store.

We are seeing companies around the world leveraging cloud for their PLM workload to accelerate the product development cycle time and ensure end-to-end digital continuity to transform business. PLM workloads on AWS cloud not only enables customers to have greater agility, but more importantly enhance their security posture and greatly reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by leveraging advanced networking, compute, storage, and managed database services. For example, a GSI helped an intelligent climate and energy solutions company migrate PTC Windchill PLM workloads to AWS that greatly enhanced the business value delivered by AWS, including operational security, reliability, performance, and cost.

Figure 1 - Migration of PLM to Cloud

Figure 1 shows a high-level overview of the relevant services and benefits with operating PLM in the cloud. Apart from lift-and-shift of PLM systems from on-premises to AWS, modernizing PLM platforms and integrating it with associated cloud-based CAD and CAE tools bring many advantages to manufacturers in the areas of agile engineering, collaborative design, and intelligent products design capabilities. AWS provides many fully managed and cost-effective services to meet customer’s automation, compute, database, and networking needs. Specifically, PLM modernization on AWS enables flexible and scalable infrastructure to accommodate varying user loads, provide low latency access with the use of advanced networking services, and provide replication PLM servers in AWS regions that are located nearer to global design centers. Furthermore, automation using AWS infrastructure automation provides a consistent way of deploying systems for staging, testing, development, and production needs. AWS also provides best practice guidance in the form of reference architecture, such as PTC Windchill PLM deployment on AWS or Siemens Teamcenter PLM on AWS or Dassault CATIA PLM system. Customers can use this guidance for a consistent and efficient deployment and operation. AWS provides fully managed AWS services for file vault and database needs, advanced security controls that cater to specific industry and regional requirements, such as with GovCloud, helping to meet regulatory requirements while also reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) and increasing performance by leveraging advanced EC2 instance types, such as Graviton and m6i processors.

There are many industrial companies who have successfully migrated their PLM systems to the cloud and reaped the benefits. An American electric vehicle manufacturer and automotive technology company is a compelling customer success story. They realized that their on-premises hosting their PLM, CAD, and CAE workloads could not keep up with their performance needs. On AWS, this automotive company was able to improve the speed of their software tools by up to 66% and could load a full vehicle bill of materials in just 22 minutes. It has also enabled collaboration through shared storage and improved availability of compute resources.

In conclusion, this note demonstrates the benefits of migrating Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems to AWS cloud. By leveraging AWS services, companies can address key challenges in product development, enhancing flexibility, collaboration, and cost-effectiveness. AWS's reference architectures and managed services provide robust support for PLM workloads. Case studies from the customers illustrate improvements in security, performance, and collaboration, underscoring the transformative potential of cloud-based PLM for modern manufacturing and engineering industries.

Authors:

Rajesh Gomatham: Principal Partner Solutions Architect, AWS

Akash Bhatia: Principal, Solutions Architect, AWS

Steve Blackwell: WorldWide Tech Lead Manufacturing and Head of Industry Solution Architects, AWS

Walker Stemple: Global Engineering & Design Leader, AWS