3 Ways Digital Solutions are Mitigating Product Development Gaps

Today's organizations are facing a number of challenges including time constraints, labor issues, time-to-market obstacles, product lifecycle declines, and more! Product development processes are struggling. Digital solutions are providing companies with nontraditional ways of combatting these challenges. From transforming the design process, to decreasing unplanned downtime, and more, these solutions are opening new doors for organizations like yours.

Digital Solutions Impact on Product Development

1. Remote Monitoring: Companies are gaining the ability to increase worker efficiency and improve time-to-market with remote monitoring (RM). Internet of Things (IoT) technology and sensors are providing insights for RM -- connecting assets and collecting data to generate actionable insights. Data is the most valuable asset within any modern organization and the lifeblood of the digital thread. These insights can help companies make future decisions based on how products are operating and/or being used in the field. Information from sensors, machines, processors, and people can be captured, measured, and analyzed for a variety of uses, such as optimizing and automating operations, improving task efficiencies, enhancing R&D, and upgrading production. Unplanned downtime can also be avoided as this information can provide insights into malfunctions before a machine is fully down. 
   
   
2. Product Design: Reduce physical prototyping costs, design cycle times, and analyze department backlog with simulation. Simulation design tools allow designers and engineers to answer critical design questions early in the product development process, saving time and effort on prototyping as you explore multiple design concepts in real-time. Real-time guidance as you design allows you to catch problems up to 65% faster and develop more innovative concepts. Test multiple design ideas quickly with live physics simulation, then refine design ideas with simulation results. In turn, innovations are brought to market faster and with much fewer physical prototypes, reducing costs.
   Enable your team with 3D design software to make smarter, faster decisions by reducing product development costs and improving workflows. Your team can build market-leading products while accounting for real-world behaviors with less prototyping.
   
   
3. Maintenance & Training:  Customers require more uptime and a higher quality of service, resulting in increased service costs and a reduction of margins. Factoring in worker shortage and differing technician experience, field service organizations are facing these challenges daily. Internet of Things (IoT) provides real-time insights that increase first-time-fix-rates by understanding issue root causes in advance. This knowledge allows technicians to arrive with needed parts, documentation, work instructions, and training. Time-based maintenance becomes condition-based maintenance, and predictive maintenance programs can detect issues before they become real problems, allowing resolutions at optimal schedules and costs.

Augmented reality (AR) provides a highly visual, interactive method of presenting relevant digital information in the context of the physical environment. Industrial augmented reality offers a better way to create and deliver easily consumable work instructions by overlaying digital content onto real-world work environments. This can be utilized for both maintenance and training. When maintenance is needed, a customized AR experience can provide step-by-step instructions overlayed with the real-world product. AR can reduce training costs by up to 50%! Companies can utilize AR as a self-guided training experience, overlaying digital aspects on the real-world and providing step-by-step training.

Impossible Challenge? Try Us. 

Selecting a digital solutions partner to help you combat the gaps of your product development projects is a valuable option to increase time-to-market, bypass labor and time constraints, and avoid product lifecycle declines.