Using agile processes and digital twin technology
The digital twin is enabling many companies to work faster and more efficiently, and it’s revolutionizing the ways people are able to collaborate in an engineering environment. Products used to be developed separately as stand-alone items, but moving into the future, the lines between them are blurring as they become more connected. You’ll no longer be able to do things the same way as you’ve always done them: instead, you’ll need software that could potentially handle hundreds of millions of line of code to design and engineer these increasingly complex products.
How do you possibly begin to do that?
One company embracing the power of the digital twin to help accomplish this complexity is Accenture, a global management company specializing in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations fields. David Rush, chief methodologist of connect products and lifecycle solutions at Accenture, discussed how Accenture has begun integrating lean, agile processes and digital twin technology so the company can deliver complex products. Some of Rush’s observations included how:
• The company’s development organization is grappling with how effective it is as it grows at what he calls “an order of magnitude that’s hard to keep up with.” It’s caused the company to ask how it trains the engineers, how it gets them working in the system and physics domains – all while working together to they’re consistent. Having a lean, agile method has helped the company address potential issues that come with how rapidly its organizations are growing.
• Accenture’s experience with agile processes has been extremely positive in merging hardware and software. Rush said the company saw potential problems with hardware teams having a small number of people and longer timelines while software teams have a large number of people and fast cycle times. By using lean agile practices, the company has been able to blend and move these two organizations together so they work together and see each other’s work transparently.
• The digital twin drives Accenture’s ability to iterate much more quickly, Rush said. Having the digital twin of the hardware cycle helps shorten the cycle, allowing the company to iterate faster than was previously possible and create more efficient collaboration between engineering organizations across the development environment.
We hope you enjoy this video.
About the author
Indrakanti “Chaks” Chakravarthy is the Marketing Programs Director working in the Americas zone at Siemens PLM Software, where he is responsible for marketing programs covering the aerospace, defense, federal and marine industries. Chaks has spent the last 30 years working for a number of companies in presales technical, sales and marketing areas of the PLM portfolio in India, Japan and the United States. He has a mechanical engineering degree from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in India.
