Digital transformation journeys can be long, and full of uncertainty for companies undertaking complex change. These cases are also exactly the kind of challenges Patrick Bionducci loves, and his team is laser-focused on simplifying, accelerating, and making change happen.
“We make digital transformation real for customers,” he says. “Software offers plenty of possibilities and promise, but if you don’t implement it into the specific workflow and processes in a customer environment it’s not real. We deliver on the promise and make it real.”
Bionducci is the president and Head of DxP Services (an ITC Infotech Brand) and during a recent interview at LiveWorx in Boston, he laid out best practices for customers navigating enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) transformations.
“To have a digital thread you need to have all pieces in order,” he says. “It starts with CAD, then PLM. Customers will often have entry-level PLM which is more like managing data, but with a closed loop you need to go upstream with application lifecycle management (ALM) and downstream with manufacturing and services. This is where we see some customers hedging because it’s quite a change.”
Bionducci and his team joined LiveWorx as a Pinnacle Sponsor, spending four days at the annual technology event sharing insight on PLM roadmapping, enterprise architecture and solution design, phased implementation including data migrations, and system integrations. The company also offers ongoing managed services with full application support on-premises, in the Cloud, or as a conversion to PTC’s Windchill+ PLM SaaS offering.
DxP Services was created in June 2022 when ITC Infotech acquired a substantial portion of PTC's PLM consulting and professional services business, including 160 PLM consultants and services experts.
The team at DxP Services has a 20-year track record of PLM services in automotive, aircraft and defense, transportation, industrial equipment, electronics and hi-tech, medical devices, and retail, footwear and apparel.
At this year’s event Bionducci highlighted how PLM transformation today differs from that even two years ago.
“It is different in the sense that the possibilities were there, but products have really evolved — both standalone in terms of depth, but also the interoperability of all those components,” he says. “Today it's even more possible to make it real with an implementation that is reasonable in timeframe and cost. The value was always there, but now it's a matter of how difficult it is, and how long it takes to make it happen.”
Bionducci, who previously led PTC's global services business, says companies have spent a lot of money on enterprise resource planning (ERP) without thinking about PLM enough.
“For a company to run really fast they need two legs, and the other one is PLM. Technology is important, but it also takes an understanding of processes that drive success.”
Bionducci sees many organizations who want to share, but are unsure exactly how to go about enabling collaboration — both within their companies, but also within the supply chain. The journey becomes real and moves quickly as soon as customers figure out how to do that, including maintaining control and protecting IP, he says.
Successful digital transformation also takes a village, and ecosystem partners become critical counterparts. Some IT teams do move implementations ahead on their own, but Bionducci says it’s the back-end of the process, and bolting together technologies only gets you so far.
“Understanding how to really leverage the out-of-the-box functionality of technology and software that gets better with every release, with the processes within the customer environment (either existing or new processes) is a totally different challenge. That's often where organizations have difficulty doing that on their own.”
Consulting firms offer the strategy, Bionducci says, but they typically don’t get into the weeds of implementation. On the flipside, technology providers typically only offer a PLM system.
DxP Services exists in the middle, having more than 700 PLM professionals who work with more than 11,000 IT service practitioners within the $11-billion ITC Limited.
“We are not going upstream to the management consulting level, but we can do much more with roadmapping, down to implementation and application services. I think that is a successful recipe.”
