The development of Industrial Internet by American Parametric Technology Corporation ("PTC" for short) began with the commercial acquisition of Thingworx in 2013. The ThingWorx platform is a proven platform that can accelerate industrial innovation. Since its development, it has achieved impressive results both in the platform capability itself, in the field of industrial APP and ecological cooperation.
Thingworx is built to promote industrial innovation
The Thingworx platform includes industrial connection components (Kepware), basic platform components (Foundation), machine learning components (Analytics), and augmented reality components (Vuforia). The capabilities include data collection, business modeling, simulation analysis, as shown in the following figure. Business orchestration and application experience capabilities.
In the industrial APP dimension, the ThingWorx platform itself contains standard APP suites for various fields of R & D, manufacturing and service of manufacturing enterprises. Such as Navigate for research and development, Manufacturing Apps and Operator Advisor for manufacturing, and Asset Advisor for services. At the same time, there are more than 600 APPs in the MarketPlace of the ThingWorx APP market covering different industries and functional areas, helping customers quickly develop and deploy industrial Internet solutions.
In the field of ecological cooperation, the ThingWorx platform has developed a complete ecological partner system covering edge and equipment providers, communication service providers, system integrators, solution providers, automation vendors, and cloud platform vendors. Work with more than 380 ecological partners to jointly develop and provide customer solutions. Among them, the strategic cooperation with Microsoft and Rockwell Automation is particularly important. The strategic cooperation with Microsoft has enabled ThingWorx to have the strong support of Azure, supporting different deployment methods (public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud) that customers want. The cooperation with Rockwell allows the ThingWorx platform to combine Rockwell's experience in automation and digital manufacturing to better bring value to customers.
The TingWorx platform attaches great importance to the developer ecosystem and has established a strong and diverse ThingWorx partner ecosystem. In the ThingWorx developer community, developers from all over the world can use the 90-day free product trial provided by PTC to quickly build their own industrial Internet applications with real use-case scenarios, and can also communicate and discuss with more than 24,000 developers from around the world. Technical issues and best practices.
In addition to the above, the ThingWorx platform has also been approved by various third-party independent analysis companies. The following shows the approvals of various analysis companies obtained in 2019:
At the same time, PTC is also actively developing industrial SaaS solutions. On November 1, 2019, PTC spent $ 470 million to acquire OnShape for pure SaaS. You only need a browser or a mobile APP to start your design work at any place and any time. In the future, PTC will also combine creative design with OnShape to greatly increase the speed of industrial innovation.
During the epidemic, PTC provides Onshape's free trial service (https://www.onshape.com/professional-trial). After filling in personal / company information online and registering an account, you can try the Onshape platform to start the online design project.
Typical Case
01.PTC Industrial Internet Service escorts Roche's new testing technology
In early March, Roche Diagnostics announced that it had obtained the emergency use authorization issued by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the new COVID-19 test. Roche ’s new test method will be completed in only three and a half hours. Patients provide reports that are about 10 times faster than existing test methods.
Since March, Roche has begun shipping the cobas? SARS-CoV-2 tester for covid19, delivering 400,000 test boxes per week to all parts of the United States, and plans to provide millions of test boxes per month worldwide.
Roche Diagnostics is an important IoT customer of PTC, and has used PTC's industrial Internet platform services for more than 10 years. After receiving FDA approval, Roche hopes to ensure that PTC can achieve three key commitments: ① scalability, including the addition and connection of a large number of new diagnostic systems. ②Ensure the service performance of the global industrial Internet platform. ③ Guarantee the uptime of all test systems.
Understanding the importance of Roche ’s work, PTC quickly mobilized and formed a cross-functional cloud service rapid response team, including R & D, product management, Internet of Things Center of Excellence, software update management, technical support and customer success management The 7 * 24-hour response team worked together to help Roche perform remote device monitoring, fault diagnosis and troubleshooting, and quickly resolve any problems that may arise. As of now, the project is progressing smoothly.
02.PTC OnShape helps MasksOn achieve the goal of providing 1 million person-times / day of protection for the first line of anti-epidemic medical care within 30 days
MasksOn is a non-profit program composed of volunteers from healthcare, academia, and technology companies across the United States. Its work objective is to provide durable, reusable, and sterilizable personal protective equipment (PPE) for clinicians fighting the frontline of the COVID-19 outbreak. MasksOn ’s current primary goal is to create enough masks to provide clinicians with 1 million person-times / day of protection in April.
In addition to producing masks as quickly and cheaply as possible, MasksOn volunteers must also prioritize the quality and safety of their production process. Use medical grade materials as much as possible to meet the OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) quality control testing standards that the COVID-19 review committee is strictly implementing. PTC's industrial Internet platform services, Onshape product design and manufacturing SaaS services provide a strong support for MasksOn's project implementation. In the case of a shortage of traditional materials, the PTC industrial Internet platform was used to quickly and easily find the source of alternative materials. With cloud-based Onshape technology, the process of collaborative design, review and BOM release of the mask is simplified, and the speed of parts processing and delivery is accelerated. During the delivery of the MasksOn mask, the daily progress of the project is equivalent to the progress of the traditional standard process for 3 months. This allowed the MasksOn team to manufacture and deliver the first batch of 395 masks at the end of March. Production is currently being accelerated at the rate of 1,000 masks per day. Ultimately, the team hopes to manufacture 50,000 masks to provide protection for 50,000 clinical medical staff during the COVID-19 crisis and ensure that 4 million patients (this data is estimated based on the current development of the disease) will receive better treatment in the next 3-12 weeks .
PTC Industrial Internet accelerates its evolution to full SaaS
Facing the sudden COVID-19 epidemic, the global manufacturing industry is facing huge challenges. Especially in the medical equipment and materials industry, as traditional customers of PTC industrial Internet services, they are facing unprecedented pressure from the government and patients. The cases introduced above fully exemplify the problems and challenges encountered in the development of the Industrial Internet in this epidemic, as well as the opportunities brought by a successful response.
The outbreak of COVID-19 in the world this time not only highlights the value of the Internet in enterprise remote office, but also the industrial Internet, which emphasizes the entire value chain of the enterprise, the interconnection of all elements, the coordination of industry chain resources, and the promotion of industry innovation The "new infrastructure" has been injected with cardiotonics. In the future, the Industrial Internet will need to accelerate development in multiple dimensions such as high value-added application scenarios, products and key technologies, core talent reserves, business models, industrial collaboration, etc .; and the digital transformation of manufacturing based on cloud computing has been on the way. The application will accelerate the evolution to full SaaS.
