The development of complex products is becoming increasingly challenging, with factors such as compliance, regulatory oversight, safety concerns, and shrinking product lifecycles adding to the complexity. Today’s complex product and software development teams also rely on expanding partner and supplier ecosystems, making it harder to navigate different work cultures and development tools. Furthermore, the competitive mandate to leverage all data for better decision making, market insight, and product quality compounds the engineering challenge.
To overcome these challenges, companies are adopting a holistic approach to their development environment. Tools that encompass requirements, test, and workflow management provide the process and data foundation to help address many of these factors. However, for companies that do not adopt a holistic development solution, they need to incorporate an open, industry-standard service for exchanging data between logical development processes efficiently.
Enter Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC). IBM has been a long-standing proponent of OSLC, and VDC Research Group’s whitepaper, “OSLC – A Driving Force behind Engineering Process Integration,” highlights the advantages of adopting a standard approach for data and workflow integration across your company’s development processes. With inputs from over 700 engineers and product development professionals, their market insights are a compelling testament to the power of an integrated development lifecycle environment enabled by OSLC.
IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) solution provides the best of both worlds – a holistic development environment underpinned by OSLC. The premise of digital engineering is to introduce efficiencies and agility into even more engineering practices through the use of digital representations and virtual exploration and validation of complex systems. So, IBM ELM also provides tools for model-based systems engineering, process management, reporting, and engineering data analysis.
The realization of digital engineering relies on all these capabilities, with the ability to manage the digital thread across all data sets and domain models. Many data sources need to be integrated and orchestrated into a single lifecycle framework that leverages a trusted source of truth. OSLC is currently the only standards-based way to address this challenge, so the IBM ELM solution leverages the OSLC service for exchanging data. And because OSLC is an open standard, IBM ELM establishes an extensible engineering data foundation open to other applications, regardless of domain modeling languages and tools used.
Digital engineering is all about enabling flexible cross-discipline innovation of complex software-driven intensive systems, from conception to delivery. Based on an open architecture that implements OSLC, IBM ELM advances and extends the power of digital engineering to companies and their increasingly vast ecosystems of partners and suppliers who collaborate to bring higher quality products that address stakeholder needs to market faster at lower cost.
At DataSkill, we’ve previously written about digital transformation with regards to data and automation. Digital transformation is about using technology to create new or modify existing business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. The same principles apply to digital engineering, and IBM ELM is a crucial tool for companies looking to unlock the power of digital engineering and stay competitive in an ever-changing market.
In conclusion, digital engineering is essential for companies developing complex products, and IBM ELM is a key tool for enabling flexible cross-discipline innovation of software-driven intensive systems. By adopting an open, industry-standard service for exchanging data, such as OSLC, companies can integrate and orchestrate many data sources into a single lifecycle framework that leverages a trusted source of truth. This allows companies to bring higher quality products that address stakeholder needs to market faster at a lower cost.