Category: Digital Enterprise

The Digital Enterprise - Content and Data

5/6/2025

After the business software with its digital processes and functionality is put to good use in the organization, it will start to produce content and data, and for a digital enterprise, what you do with this data will largely determine your level of success.

First, it is important to set some evaluation criteria to be able to analyse the output from the processes. The objective and scope of the analysis needs to be clarified before diving into the data crunching part. The business process itself must be understood, but if the “pyramid” is followed, then the business needs, the business process and its digital counterpart is adequately described.

The data and content produced when executing the processes must be harvested analysed, measured, and managed to provide actionable insight.
Is the quantity of data as expected? If no one uses the processes in the system, then there will not be much content, and it will not matter if the process is perfectly implemented and described….
What is the quality of the data like? Is it complete, accurate and consistent?
Does the data appear in a timely manner for decisions to be taken based on the data, or does it only arrive after the fact?

All these criteria (and there are of course a lot more) are difficult enough when considering processes executed within one business software platform, but becomes a lot more difficult when a process spans multiple business software platforms, meaning integration and data exchange will have to be considered as well. We will, for now focus on processes within a platform as the next chapter will be about data exchange across platforms.
A part of the analysis should consider if security and data privacy are sufficient to meet regulatory compliance as well as your internal company standards.

When considering the execution of business processes, it is common today that business software has capabilities to describe What happened typically in the form of dashboards and reports. Here it is a matter of defining the KPI’s one would wish to monitor. To examine why it happened becomes a bit trickier because it entails some form of root cause analysis. Moving even further into more predictive analysis to answer what might happen if we reduce the throughput of something, for instance throughput of the cooling pumps in a cooling system would depend on the quality of several data sets combined: The design data, the calibrated asset data as well as the runtime data from integrated control and safety systems and large amounts of historical data. Then “something/someone” needs to make sense of it all, and here AI with machine learning come into play. Furthermore, it would be nice if we could get an answer to what should be done based on all the data that has been analysed which land us firmly in the realm of prescriptive analytics.
All of this depends on the quality and amount of data.
The old saying still holds true: “garbage in, garbage out”, so data and process must be monitored, analysed, and optimised in an iterative fashion to allow for continuous improvement of both.

Some examples I have used before highlights the potential value of data: “…. real power in the operational phase becomes evident when operational data is associated with each delivered pump. In such a case the operational data can be compared with environmental conditions the physical equipment operates in. Let us say that the fluid being pumped contains more and more sediments, and our historical records of similar conditions tells us that the pump will likely fail during the next ten days due to wear and tear of critical components. However, it is also indicated that if we reduce the power by 5 percent, we will be able to operate the full system until the next scheduled maintenance window in 15 days. Information like that gives real business value in terms of increased uptime” Digital Twin - What needs to be under the hood?

or

“ ..Data in itself is not of any value whatsoever, but if the data can be analysed to reveal meaning, trends, or knowledge about how a product is used by different customer segments, then it has tremendous value to product manufacturers.
If we look at the operational phase of a product, and by that, I mean everything that happens from manufactured product to disposal, then any manufacturer would like to get their hands on such data, either to improve the product itself or sell services associated with it.
Such services could be anything from utilizing the product as a platform for an ecosystem of connected products to new business models where the product itself is not the key but rather the service it provides. You might sell guaranteed uptime or availability provided that the customer also buys into your service program for instance.” Big Data and PLM, what’s the connection?

In short. Paying attention to your process generated data, its quality and the way you analyse allows you to make business decisions based on data, not gut feeling.

Bjorn Fidjeland

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The Digital Enterprise - Digital Processes and Functionality

4/13/2025

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As the business software is selected, the next step is to implement the described processes “your way of working” as digital equivalents in the business software.
These are the typical PLM, ERP, CRM, MES, EAM projects that are executed in organizations and that tends to create headlines like: “More than 50 percent of IT projects fail”

How do we avoid ending up in these statistics?
As for any kind of project it is important to define clear objectives. If we have, as per the “pyramid” image above, identified the business needs and defined the business processes, this part should be straightforward. However, be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. Then establish measurable objectives for the implementation.

Pay careful attention to involving the affected stakeholders. They need to be informed, engaged and consulted regularly during the implementation of the digital processes. They will also be very valuable in terms of feedback and guidance.

If your enterprise has history in terms of legacy data, some tough decisions must be made. Does it make sense to migrate all the data into the new system or systems? Is it even possible? What value will it bring to migrate all data compared to the cost?
Do we leave all legacy data in the old system and gradually phase it out? However, gradually might take a really long time depending on the lifecycle of your product or facility data managed in the system….
A third option would be to partially migrate data from the legacy system, meaning, that only the most important data will be migrated to the new system in accordance with the new data model and processes. This option will make the migration exercise less costly and time consuming, but it will still leave the need for a functioning legacy system containing the old data even if very few individuals in the organization need to use it.

Next, decisions will have to be made regarding how much configuration or customization of the business software compared to the needs of the business. In my view it is absolutely crucial that business is involved in this step and that they keep an open mind. Is it really important to our business execution to change the software process or would it be possible to run as per Out Of The Box? If the process is unique to you and gives you a competitive advantage, then I would say yes, it would probably be a good idea to customize. Just bear in mind that the cost is not just to implement the unique process, but also to maintain and upgrade it yourself.

For the execution of the implementation project there are several different schools. Personally, I lean towards an agile approach with SCRUM like frameworks. The main reason for this is that I’ve seen first-hand on multiple occasions the power of the “show and tell” at the end of a sprint where business stakeholders get to see the developed functionality and ask questions to the scrum team and the scrum team get to show what they have achieved as well as asking questions to business stakeholders. It facilitates a powerful “us” dynamic as opposed to “us vs them”, and it also means that the project is better equipped to capture misunderstandings and errors early.

As the system with the defined digital processes and functionality is ready to be deployed and put to real use in the organization the biggest pitfall of all is hidden in the shadows……

Rollout, training, and organizational change management. Tons of literature has been written regarding its importance, and virtually everybody agrees it is important, so why is it so hard?
Because it involves people, and even more difficult, people that must change the way they do things. People, we, do not like to change, we resist change.

Is it then hopeless? Not at all, it just means that attention and resources must be set aside to deal with this important phase of any business software project. As an example, SharePLM, offers a lot of great articles on this topic.

After the business software with its digital processes and functionality is put to good use in the organization, it will start to produce content and data. For a digital enterprise, what you do with this data will largely determine your level of success.

Bjorn Fidjeland

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The Digital Enterprise - Business Software

4/7/2025

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When business needs are identified and processes are defined it becomes important to identify a business software strategy to support business process execution.
Implementing the business processes in software allows the enterprise to make sure the process is followed, measure it, ensure feedback with respect to both the process itself and regarding its outcomes.
Effective implementation of the business processes in software is absolutely crucial for a digital enterprise to be able to continuously improve, detect changes, transform and respond to new business opportunities as well as threats.

In recent times I have encountered some interesting points for debate. Some startup companies only roughly define their business processes before scanning the market for business software. The idea being that such software solutions generally come with pre-defined processes at least on a lower discipline level, and that they may be adopted straight away by the startup as there are no legacy processes nor legacy data.

I see both pros and cons to this approach, but would love to hear your opinion first.

If we examine some different business software strategy approaches, I would like to focus on the three most common ones.

The monolithic approach:
In this approach, one software solution or at least software from only one vendor is selected. It does have the advantage that, at least in theory, there is a one stop shop for Product Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Manufacturing Execution System, after sales and services etc.
The downside is that all eggs are in one basket, and it will be difficult to ever change systems.
And trust me, the software provider knows this.

A few core enterprise business systems:
The strategy here is to identify best of breed platforms for major “chunks” of the business process. Examples could be one platform for design and engineering, another for procurement and manufacturing, a third for aftermarket and service. For this setup to work it becomes necessary to spend quite a bit of time and money on integration strategies to ensure that sufficient information flows back and forth between the software platforms. A key enabler here is to define a common language across the enterprise, meaning a Reference Data Library (RDL) of master data classes to ensure interoperability between the software platforms. This will greatly aid integrations as cumbersome data mapping tables can be eliminated in the integrations (Data Integration – Why Dictionaries…..? )

Orchestrated microservices:
The idea here is to utilize central orchestration which manages the interactions and workflows between different microservices while the services themselves are developed to perform the activities.
This approach is flexible and allows for using tools like Kubernetes for container orchestration and workflow engines like camunda and apache airflow for managing business processes. The downside is that it will lead to considerable development to implement your business processes

One should always carefully consider the amount of energy and resources put into in-house developed solutions as they will have to be maintained as well as upgraded technically to ensure they stand the test of time both functionality wise as well as from a software security aspect.

Bjorn Fidjeland

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The Digital Enterprise - Business Processes

4/4/2025

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Business processes should be formally described to convey the way we work in the company. Such process descriptions are typically found in the company’s management system.

Figure 1

There are different policies regarding granularity and how to break down high level processes to lower level processes with activities. A rule of thumb is that there should not be much more than 3 levels from a high level process until you find what activities you actually need to perform to fulfill the overall process.

Activities or tasks that need to be performed in a process must have clear descriptions of what the required input is to successfully complete the activity, what tasks need to be performed within the activity, by what role and discipline and what the expected outcome or output is from the activity (figure 2).

Figure 2

Furthermore, it must be clearly specified who should receive the output of the activity and why (figure 3).

Figure 3

When I interview organizations, especially during different elicitation activities, I very often hear that there are missing or insufficient feedback loops between different disciplines. Such feedback loops are easy to draw in a process, like the figure 4 below, but it is a whole lot more difficult in reality as it involves.............. People, departments (which is even more difficult as it involves a different "tribe of people" ) and possibly even other companies.

Figure 4

Hard as it may be, feedback loops are crucial for continuous improvement and learning, especially as the company grows to a size where it is hard to know what everyone is doing.

In my view, trying to measure or at least monitor that feedback activities are performed is of the utmost importance.

Bjorn Fidjeland

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The Digital Enterprise - Business Needs

4/1/2025

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In the article “What is a digital enterprise? And why should you care?” I wrote that “Business needs must be catered for by defined business processes (“the way we work”)”
The needs of the business may be in support of strategies, so plans for how we intend to achieve a certain goal or mission.
Such strategies are typically there so that we may reach some vision we have of what our enterprise should be in the future.
Furthermore, as business is also conducted in the digital realm, we need to capture business needs to support the enterprise’ policy for IT security. Such a policy or IT security strategy also influences budgets and resources.
Questions like: “Can we move to cloud to diminish the need for hardware and resources?”. The answer to this may depend on regulatory requirements as well as industry requirements.
We may see clear business needs that we wish to solve in the best possible way, however we are more often than not restricted by available budgets and resources.

But how do we identify business needs?
Even in well established organizations I’ve found that performing so called “business requirement elicitation” initiatives or projects regularly (at least every 3 years) across the departments of an enterprise is very useful. Not only to capture the business needs within departments, but also needs regarding what each department need from other departments to effectively do their work.

When the needs are validated, verified and communicated to all stakeholders it becomes a very effective way of communicating why for instance engineering need this and that information from sales, or why manufacturing desperately would like to have information they know engineering has, but is not provided.

I was once responsible for an enterprise-wide business requirement elicitation initiative regarding an end-to-end process for facility assets. The lifecycle of assets were defined as “from a need is identified in the facility to decommissioning of the physical asset” needless to say it spanned pretty much all departments and functions in the company from engineering through procurement, manufacturing, supply, installation, commissioning, operations, maintenance and ultimately decommissioning.
Some key stakeholders clearly voiced their discontent with the initiative saying it was a complete waste of their time, and that it was a classical case of shooting sparrows with cannons… Nevertheless, after a bit of persuasion they went along with it.
After the elicitation exercises, the business requirements from all departments and functions were verified, validated and mapped towards an overall end-to-end business process. The findings and recommendations based on the findings were presented to all stakeholders involved.

Interestingly the very same stakeholders who voiced discontent, now saw the benefit of the exercise and wondered why we had not done it sooner.

When the business needs are identified, it becomes a question of how we can fulfill them. How can we organize our way of working to fulfill the business needs?
This leads us to the next level in the pyramid, namely business processes.

Bjorn Fidjeland

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What is a digital enterprise? And why should you care?

4/2/2024

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Hallmarks of so called digital enterprise companies are that they are able to mirror and refine the real-world way of conducting business in the digital world, and in some cases even blur the boundaries between the two.

Such companies design their business processes (their “ways of working”), implements them digitally, executes, and measures their processes continuously. The measurements are then used to optimize and adjust the business processes both in the real and digital world.

Emphasis is put on company services being protected by cyber security measures to safeguard both the services and the company itself

Companies that have focused on this are more able to continuously improve as well as detect, adapt, and transform to changes, opportunities and threats in their business environment.

To make this work, as per the figure below, business needs must be catered for by defined business processes ("the way we work")

The defined business processes must be implemented by digital counterparts in enterprise business software

Data and content produced when executing the processes must be analyzed, measured and managed to provide actionable insight

Data exchanges must be interoperable to support cross cutting processes and data transfer or even better, linking of data, between enterprise business software when needed.

An infrastructure of hardware and software capable of running the enterprise business software is the foundation for it all

In my article series "PLM Tales from a true mega project" and more specifically in Chapter 8 - Digital Twin I wrote:

"The thing is…. In order to achieve what is described in this article series, most companies would have to change the way they are currently thinking and working across their different departments, which brings us to the fact that real business transformation would also be required. The latter is most of the time a much larger and more time-consuming obstacle than the technical ones because it involves a cultural change."

So while the "PLM Tales from a true mega project" and "Plant Information Management" articles focused on the information that needs to be managed and how this may be done, this and articles to come will focus on how the business may be transformed as well as the governance needed to make it happen.

Bjorn Fidjeland

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The Digital Enterprise - Content and Data

The Digital Enterprise - Digital Processes and Functionality

The Digital Enterprise - Business Software

The Digital Enterprise - Business Processes

The Digital Enterprise - Business Needs

What is a digital enterprise? And why should you care?

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