LiveWorx 2019: Harnessing New Technology for Industrial Innovation

LEAP had the pleasure of attending PTC’s LiveWorx 2019 held last month in Boston & bringing together over 6,500 attendees to learn about the latest advances in PTC’s Digital Transformation technology. PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann opened proceedings with help from senior representatives of Volvo, Rockwell Automation and Howden, providing high level insights into the digital transformation strategy of PTC and its partners as well as live demonstrations of their latest advancements in the Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, Real-Time Simulation and Digital Twin.

At LEAP, we’ve now had representatives attend the past 5 LiveWorx events and we felt that 2019 marked a key turning point where PTC and it’s key customers were now demonstrating ready-to-use technology that represented real results and more tangible outcomes – as opposed to announcing plans or initiatives that were still some way from completion. Indeed, in 2019 the fruits of recent partnerships & acquisitions were on display, with PTC’s immediate support of authoring for Microsoft Hololens 2, and the availability of PTC’s Vuforia Expert Capture just a couple of examples (which comes as a result of the acquisition of Waypoint Labs in 2018, plus an intense 12 months of R&D in the meantime).

Heppelmann’s message in his keynote was clear – in order for an enterprise to undergo digital transformation across its products, people and practices a unique set of software solutions are required and PTC’s offerings from CAD to PLM to IoT to AR, are uniquely placed to provide companies with the toolset needed to transform. The integration between these technologies is stronger than ever with new AR, simulation and change management features being added to Creo directly.

• If you are planning to work with Augmented Reality – then you will still need great CAD tools and Creo is the obvious choice.
• If you are working on Internet of Things projects – then you also likely need a robust PLM system and Windchill is uniquely positioned to handle both IoT and traditional PLM datasets.

Data generated during the design phase using traditional 3D CAD provides the genesis of what Heppelmann describes as the ‘Digital Thread’, a concept that sees design data evolve not just through iterating on the CAD model itself, but by feeding it through IoT enabled PLM that captures real world usage data of the product itself, as well as of the processes (including human work-flow interaction) used to create the product. This data all works in unison to increase understanding of the overall processes of the enterprise, in turn greatly improving quality and productivity.

During Heppelmann’s keynote, new solutions were unveiled including Vuforia Expert Capture, an AR driven training/learning tool that allows an expert user to walk through a process (a maintenance task for example) and record it in AR to allow less experienced workers to repeat the process later, following the step by step guide created. “With AR we are going to shift away from in advance and just in case training, which is wasteful and ineffective anyway, to in context and just in time micro-courses that tell me just what I need to know, right here, right now.”

Heppelmann’s keynote also takes a detailed look at how Volvo is using the PTC software suite on its truck range to drive innovation while increasing efficiency and quality across its fleet.

Watch PTC President & CEO Jim Heppelmann’s Keynote presentation Harnessing New Technology for Industrial Innovation below or browse the other LiveWorx Keynote presentations here.