Practice

With the digitization roadmap to a truly digital company

The digitization of business processes has received remarkable attention in recent years. On the one hand, the Corona pandemic ruthlessly exposed digital gaps, and on the other hand, in view of the political, social and ecological changes, companies are being called upon more than ever to act in a more agile and sustainable way. Motivation is high enough and progress in digitization is becoming more and more visible. However, implementation is usually less based on a digitization roadmap that shows the milestones and waypoints to the goal, but rather on a salami tactic.

Digitalization in small bites poses risks

When I talk to representatives of medium-sized companies about digitization, the answer is often: Yes, we do it all the time! Examples include actions such as the creation of policies to increase the use of Office software features throughout the company, the introduction of a ticket system, or the use of a requirements management tool in product development.

This reflects a common practice of carrying out digitization projects on a divisional or departmental basis, in relation to individual tasks or sub-processes. At first glance, it often seems attractive to plan and implement projects from a departmental or site perspective, because the coordination effort is lower and department-specific solutions can supposedly be implemented quickly.

In principle, implementing demanding projects in manageable steps is a sensible approach. So does generating benefits quickly and making digitization progress continuously visible. However, the fragmented approach also carries risks: This is when the target image of digitization is unclear and the path to achieving it is not adequately described. Here, there is a realistic risk of not achieving essential goals of digitization projects. For example, not exploiting the potential of new, digital business models and thus not driving forward the digital transformation of the company. Or not using the company-wide and cross-company data treasures if the focus is only on local optimization.

The benefits of a digitization roadmap

To put it up front: With a digitization roadmap, companies can minimize the above-mentioned risks with little effort. It provides a reliable, medium-term guideline for all digitization activities in the company, aligned with a clear target image. With its different perspectives on the topic of digitization, it addresses the specialist departments, IT and management. The digitization roadmap should contain some essential information:

What is the company’s level of digitization?
The basis of the digitization roadmap is an inventory of the current level of digitization in the company. For this purpose, the existing target images, requirements, and activities in the various corporate divisions and hierarchies are reviewed. Common maturity models help to assess the company’s level of digitization.
What is the target scenario?
Once the status quo has been established, a clear, coordinated target scenario for digitization can be drawn up. The target scenario contains an overview of the future digitally end-to-end business processes as well as the future application architecture and the necessary information services.
Which sub steps are necessary?
Once the goal is clear, the next step is to define and describe the necessary subprojects. In order to prioritize the subprojects in a meaningful way, the required internal and external resources and the possible project risks are estimated. The information previously obtained from the inventory is also used to extrapolate the benefit and business potential of the individual digitization subprojects. This makes it possible to calculate business cases for the planned projects.
The project team and management are thus able to decide on the subprojects and their prioritization according to objective cost/benefit criteria, resource availability and other company-specific parameters. In this way, today’s digitization bites become defined, evaluated subprojects within an overarching context.
What is the business case?
The high degree of concretization of digitization activities, especially of the relevant business case, is an essential basis for reliable financing of digitization projects. For example, special IT project financiers offer flexible top-up leasing that adjusts the leasing rates to the expected increase in benefits. Or even the financing of internal personnel resources. With such financing models, digitization then even succeeds without any restrictions on liquidity.

Conclusion

In the past, only individual projects were often launched. Currently, however, more and more of our customers are taking advantage of strategic planning with digitization roadmaps. With little effort, they offer a reliable orientation for the digital transformation with a clear target picture, concrete business case and alternative financing options.

What is Material Data Management?

When someone asks me something about Material Data Management, I always counter by asking what exactly is meant by “material”. This may not be the answer the other person expects at that moment, but it saves us both long minutes of confusion and talking past each other. The reason: not all materials are the same.

About the ambiguity of language

As a Frenchman in Germany, I am used to the fact that ambiguity leads to misunderstandings. Some expressions cannot be translated one-to-one from one language to another – at least not in such a way that it is immediately clear to everyone what is meant. A well-known example is the word “Gemütlichkeit”. The term only exists in German. More insidious, however, are the so-called false friends: word pairs such as “gift” in English and “Gift” in German. They look the same, but the meaning is fundamentally different. Even as an experienced polyglot, one is not protected from this. For example, my French interlocutors may seem irritated when I say that something has “irrité” me, meaning that something has surprised me. However, they understand this to mean that I have got some kind of skin rash out of sheer annoyance.

What can lead to funny and even sometimes slightly embarrassing situations in everyday life often causes inefficiency in the working world. To find examples, we don’t even have to look in an international context: Even within a German-speaking organization, not everyone necessarily speaks the same language. This is not due to the strong dialects in many places, but to the disciplinary nature of the language: Different people with different qualifications or expertise can understand different things by the same word.

And that brings me to the topic of this article. More precisely, to the multilingual mesh and the interdisciplinary ambiguity of the word “material”, whose galactic confusion around the terminology I would like to resolve.

Material is not equal to material

Enterprise software is a lot about managing materials and their data. There are great solutions for this. They are called Materials Management or Materials Data Management or even Master Material Data Management. The names sound very similar and are often used synonymously in practice. Yet they refer to completely different things. Freely following the motto “material is equal to material”, it is overlooked that the word can have a different meaning for different disciplines and things are lumped together that have little to do with each other. Confusion and misunderstanding are guaranteed.

Differences within the disciplines

In production logistics or material requirements planning, a material is a logistical unit, a resource that is needed for some value-adding process. Goods that can be purchased, such as a screw, a flange, a spindle, a tire, and so on. The art of sensibly procuring, moving and storing materials is called “Materialwirtschaft” in German and Materials Management in English.

In the context of product development, materials in this sense do not play a role. Development is not interested in the hood and where it is stored, but only in its description. To put it in the language of information technology: Development defines classes, production logistics manages instances of these classes. However, the concept of material reappears here as well, because in linguistic usage, items, parts, and assemblies are readily called materials. The reason for this is that they become materials in the sense of production logistics at the interface between PLM and ERP. This gives rise to misleading terms such as Material Management or Material Data Management. It would be more correct to speak of Master Data Management in the sense of parts master management.

In engineering (including design and simulation), the word material describes the physical composition of an object in the sense of materials science or materials technology: i.e., whether an object is made of wood, PA66, Inconel, or GFRP, for example. This is obvious. The management of all information about materials and their properties is called Material Data Management. Confusingly, the acronym MDM also stands for Master Data Management, which is not particularly conducive to sharpening the terms.

Different disciplines, different meanings of the word material

Conclusion

The confusion is great. PLM solutions that are tailored to the respective disciplines provide a remedy. They serve the different requirements optimally and thus ensure better collaboration overall. With Master Data Management as a core PDM function, all parts master data can be kept consistent and managed efficiently. Modern Material Data Management stores all information on materials and serves as a reference for the entire product development process. Material Compliance helps document the quality-checked delivery of regulated materials and precursors and ensures that only approved substances are processed. With interfaces to ERP systems, digital materials (in the sense of development) then also easily make the step into the physical world and become materials in the sense of production logistics.

Personas for business software – a gimmick or sustainable added value?

“Personas are just start-up knick-knacks, and for business software just a gimmick!” I’m sure many product developers have heard this before. I certainly have. But what is the truth behind the criticism that personas offer relevant added value for consumer products and are just creative add-ons for business software?

What are personas anyway?

Personas are fictitious people who represent typical representatives of a specific target group. They give product developers, customers and stakeholders an idea of who uses the product. In addition to a photo and name, personas typically include information on age, profession, free-time activities, family status and curriculum vitae, as well as typical needs and fears.

Personas in the context of business software

However, how do I deal with this as a product developer when my target group is primarily not people with individual needs and ideas, but with concrete professional challenges? For example, whether digital asset manager Diana Asmussen likes to play computers in her free time or go on vacation with her dogs is of no interest to product development. Diana steps into the spotlight with her professional needs as a digital asset manager and her requirements for an IoT system. When designing business software, employees should be addressed who want to complete their tasks efficiently and act in their roles and company processes.

CONTACT’s Personas

We at CONTACT therefore decided to create personas based on their roles and associated tasks within a fictitious company. We obtained input from our internal subject matter experts and customer interviews. Each persona has a task description and information on how to use CONTACT Elements.

Exemplary representation of the personas and team memberships of a fictitious customer

To be more specific, this means…

The holistic view of user needs provides valuable added value for product development – from knowledge building to quality assurance.

Personas make users more tangible and help new and long-standing product developers to get to know our target groups better.

By answering questions like: Who works with the 3D Cockpit? What does a user do in variant management? Or with whom does a CAE engineer interact? they know exactly for whom they are developing and can serve requirements in a more targeted manner. As sample users in concepts, demos and review systems, including all the rights they would have in a real environment, personas also ensure that work during development and quality assurance is user-centric.

But personas also have a high added value outside of product development. In presentations and in consulting, we use them to vividly depict scenarios, to build up understanding, and for identification.

So my answer to the initial question of whether personas are a gimmick or offer sustainable added value is clear: Personas are a central element in developing the best possible software for the user. They clarify needs, help to prioritize requirements, and promote a sustainable build-up of knowledge about the target groups company-wide.