It’s Time to Fine-Tune Your Digital Engineering Strategy

It is hard to imagine life without smartphones. Superbly engineered, they deliver customized services that are continually improving thanks to a reimagined business model that is centered around a digital ecosystem. This ecosystem facilitates a constant feedback loop to R&D and design (products and services) teams. It integrates the latest usage feedback and advanced technologies for on-device intelligence to improve user experience, which we enjoy daily.

Now, this model has become vital for all devices across industries, meeting rising demands for innovative services that go beyond just leveraging the connected products themselves. This is now valid across industries, companies, and business models (B2B, B2C, etc.). This includes capabilities such as assisted driving, wearable health monitors, or tech-enhanced appliances that are now mostly sold “as-a-service.”

Creating intelligent, service-based products requires companies to integrate traditional and digital engineering. This combines technology selection, software-hardware integration, and digital platform utilization.

To dominate their market, after defining their market position, companies must revamp the processes that underpin them. These include design, engineering, manufacturing, and support—leveraging digital technologies to deliver these advancements in due time.

The Opportunity, and the Pressure of Digital Engineering

According to Zinnov Zones, only 35% of product companies currently offer intelligent services, with 53% planning to do so soon.¹ Those who are lagging risk having low-value or unsellable products while competitors stride ahead with alternatives. Threats intensify as traditional rivals and the Silicon Valley behemoths build sector-specific digital products. And no industrial sector is safe from a new, digital native disruptor.

Zinnov Zones found that digital engineering investment among the world's top R&D spenders grew 18% annually from 2019-2021; such investment will potentially double by 2025 and surpass 50% of total R&D spend.

Early adopters have shown how they can gain value through improved customer service, reduced costs, faster R&D, and scalability. They leverage systems connecting user insights to digital design, supply chain, and product lifecycle management for rapid product upgrades and launches. And finally, they leapfrog their competitors.

The Challenges of Digitally Engineering New Products and Services

Adopting digital engineering for product creation requires new approaches and skills, a challenge for traditional companies lacking digital infrastructure and facing culture change.

Going incremental, companies risk resorting to product-centric strategies, adding 'intelligence' to each product, leading to integration issues from device interoperability and technology platform inconsistencies. Despite massive investments, this usually results in inferior products requiring constant upgrades and in real-world issues such as software bugs or pairing problems.

Instead, successful companies overhaul their traditional engineering approach and build a collaborative, digital ecosystem that enables rapid feedback loops for innovation, new product launches, and permanent collaboration between design, manufacturing, and services. Mastering these cycles and the underpinning technological enablers is at the heart of a successful continuous business reinvention every CEO looks after.

Digital Pillars for Engineering Excellence

To successfully transform their approach, businesses must leverage digital engineering through a strategy that encapsulates five pillars. These pillars are critical and guide the transformation of product creation and delivery, leading to competitive, intelligent products:

Building digital engineering capability necessitates notable shifts in people and culture. Companies must develop skills for selecting appropriate technology and crafting software for each new product. A scalable collaborative infrastructure should be created to house digital engineering systems, allowing for effortless integration of new products and the ability to adapt to evolving computing and data storage demands. Consistent software engineering frameworks need to be established to ensure robust foundations and seamless integration of products.

This also involves the development of libraries of digital components to speed up the developmental process. Companies must also look to access top talent globally, embracing the 'follow the sun' work pattern across different time zones, made possible by using collaborative digital tools and the implementation of agile methodologies. To address inherent cultural challenges, collaboration initiatives must be launched with the aim of bridging the divide between product and digital engineers and training sales and support teams on the use of new digital tools.

Act Now

Delivering these products means mastering the whole digital technology stack, including semiconductors and electronics, embedded software and hardware, connectivity, device design, compute, cloud, analytics, and AI. It means building digital products, digital ecosystems, and digital twins of the entire process from R&D to manufacture to lifetime management.

Pressure is growing as innovation from competitors and startups raise the stakes for what your consumers can expect. Embrace digital engineering to stay ahead of the game.

Reference

1. Zinnov Zones 2021, The unabated rise of digital engineering, May 2022.

Nicolas Rousseau serves as Chief Digital Engineering & Manufacturing Officer at Capgemini Engineering.