Are You “Digital Transformation-Ready”?

So, your customers are committed to a Digital Transformation (DT) journey. How does this affect the engineering organization? Engineering executives expect integrating digital technology into all aspects of the business will deliver great value. They expect DT to fundamentally change and improve business operations. As part of the DT journey, engineering teams want to unify and update systems, organizations, and processes to support next-generation product development cycles. Their engineering tools requirements, infrastructure ,and processes will be viewed through this lens. Are your offerings ready to support your customers’ DT projects with scalable, digital enterprise-ready architecture and capabilities?

Traditional test and data acquisition systems, critical to Design Validation and Design Verification, are often developed as thick client applications and are purpose-built for local analytics processing and visualization. But, to be a first-class participant in a DT strategy, these systems need to be upgraded to an enterprise platform fortified with server-based performance, IT-class security, and web-based interactivity. Single-purpose engineering tools need to be able to connect to and support AI/ML model development and simulation tools that leverage the enterprise computing infrastructure.

At Viviota, our software offers flexible solutions that meet the most challenging DT requirements our enterprise customers find as they tap into their engineering dark data. Viviota helps customers and partners upgrade engineering applications to: 

• Scale
• Support global collaboration 
• Support new process automation (as part of the DT journey ) without requiring application rewrites

Let’s take a look at a few examples:

One of our customers, a large North American truck manufacturer, made a commitment to DT pre-pandemic. They wanted to access data from several geographic locations, and needed to streamline and automate data collection and analytics processes. They had a legacy database in place but realized it would not scale to meet their future requirements. Our Viviota Time-to-Insight™ (TTI) software provided the engineering data and analytics connectivity they needed to “collaborate” with existing systems, while completely transforming the data import and analytics processes. With TTI they were able to streamline the data import process, and automate their analytics with a system that scaled for the entire organization. Collaboration significantly increased across machines as well as staff. 

A second example is from a partner with a desktop analytics application. With our TTI software, we helped extend the engineering desktop application to support data sharing and “serverized” analytics. Local analysis routines were moved into a server-side environment which offered the scalable compute power they needed and access to automation workflows. TTI seamlessly ingests files created by their application, making them accessible to other engineering teams and executing the application-specific analytics in a distributed server environment. This gives our partner the ability to scale and operate on much larger sets of test data and analytics, as well as automate the analytics process and share data across teams. This was unavailable to them before in a streamlined manner.

Viviota has become a trusted partner in the engineering Digital Transformation journey. While objectives may vary, there are recurring fundamentals that we are able to help both customers and partners overcome. Many are trapped with client-based silo’ed applications that were developed at a time when addressing DT requirements was not yet a priority. We align with the mantra “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast''. In our case, “Big” means an order of magnitude of savings in product release schedules, first time yield, and field failure rates. “Start small” is targeting a critical bottleneck where data analytics and decision making are subpar. “Scale fast” is a development roadmap to encompass the organization’s highest level KPIs.  

To start means thinking ahead. From your legacy systems perspective, you’ll be adding these requirements to enable them for the DT journey:

• Data and analytics that are accessible to engineering teams and systems throughout the enterprise
• Computational scaling that includes automating analytics without a total application rewrite
• Extending your laptop engineering applications with support for a central repository that is designed to handle raw engineering data with its associated metadata as well as any analytics and AI/ML models from your laptop application, which can now be managed securely
• Incorporating cloud architectures and best practices to support features like engineering-friendly dashboards and distributed analytics.

It’s not a coincidence that these requirements match the features found in Viviota’s TTI Repository and TTI Edge products:

• Customizable ingestion pipelines for thousands of different data sources. Data is standardized, converted, and enriched
• Centralized storage and management of import data
• Cleansed and unified data is added to a search index for quick data searching
• Discovered data can be routed out to local analytics packages on engineers’ laptops for further analysis
• Ability to automate and execute repetitive engineering analytics in a distributed model and scale (Edge/Cloud or both)
• Design, develop and deploy larger AI/ML models that incorporate the key metrics, statistics and KPIs from existing and future engineering analytics results.

We’ve been working with thought leaders and industry fast-movers for several years to develop our solutions. If you are a system supplier to an end user organization with DT demands, we invite you to explore a partnership with us to discover how Viviota can make your customer journey more productive.