COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on product design and development. For starters, what had been largely an in-person activity in 2019 (approximately 2% of teams worked remotely) shifted to around 60% work from home in 2020. Moreover, it appears this shift will be permanent, as 30–40% of these product development and manufacturing teams will continue to work at home or in hybrid fashion post-pandemic. In light of this change, the need for a flexible, open, scalable, cloud-based product life-cycle management (PLM) platform has never been greater. The multiple challenges driving digital transformation (DX) have only accelerated during the pandemic and include:
- Addressing global expansion and its competitive challenges
- Dealing with connected products, processes, people, and services
- Transforming digitally to unify silos of innovation
- Connecting to product, service, and customer experiences for innovation and on going quality
- Understanding customer needs, empathizing with customer challenges, and sensing changing preferences and demand to deliver optimal customer experiences
- Working with external industry ecosystems as a required element of doing business effectively
- Optimizing resources, products, and assets across ecosystems as well as improving visibility across the digital thread, efficiency of manufacturing operations, and proactive and predictive service