Technology

Optimizing the service supply chain

The service supply chain is unique for every organization, and it is profoundly complex for those with assets scattered around—or moving throughout—the world. Commercial aviation, international shipping, and defense agencies, for example, have globally distributed fleets of vehicles that require routine servicing and maintenance. Automotive, industrial equipment, and medical device manufacturers also have scores of machines that demand ongoing upkeep.

Maximizing asset uptime and performance while minimizing cost, inefficiency, and waste involves millions of variables and decision points. Not only which parts and materials are needed to maintain each asset, but when should they be purchased and from whom? Where should those parts and materials be distributed and stored? And how can these decisions be best aligned with the movement, operating conditions, and servicing needs of the assets in question?

PTC’s Servigistics software provides answers and helps solve complex challenges related to supply and demand uncertainty, the financial performance and sustainability of supply chain operations, and decisions related to stocking levels, repairs, purchases, and inventory movements. The highly advanced, AI-driven software helps many of the world’s largest companies ensure the right parts are in the right places at the right time for the right price.

Accelerating innovation

Although PTC has been developing Servigistics AI/ML–powered capabilities since 2006, company leaders say their R&D efforts accelerated in 2021. And these advances directly coincide with the company’s use of FlexPod Converged Infrastructure with Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System, NetApp storage, and 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors.

“The pace of innovation has accelerated rapidly in the past several years, and it aligns with our adoption of Cisco technologies,” says Dr. Vipul Agrawal, vice president of Servigistics product management at PTC and industrial AI thought leader. “UCS X-Series, in particular, has given us more computing capabilities, better data connectivity and visibility, and tremendous processing power.”

Servigistics software creates a digital twin of each customer’s physical supply chain, he explains, and uses a variety of data sources to predict future needs, provide decision recommendations and automation, and optimize supply chain efficiency. It also reviews and analyzes its own predictions, decisions, and recommendations to continuously improve the solution’s accuracy and performance.

“Many of our customers need to make a million or more decisions every day, which is well beyond human scale.” Dr. Agrawal explains. “Not only are we creating a digital twin of each customer’s supply chain and the countless variables therein, but we now have an alter ego, if you will, sitting on top of our AI engine that is observing, recording, and analyzing every decision the engine makes.”

This new “alter ego,” officially known as the Servigistics Performance Analytics and Intelligence Platform, is built on FlexPod and powered by UCS X-Series.

“From our day-to-day R&D to our hackathon events where we try new use cases and push the limits of what’s possible, we can’t be limited by computing power,” Dr. Agrawal says. “Cisco technologies have been at the heart of our recent innovation.”

Standardizing, consolidating, and simplifying IT

Prior to the adoption of FlexPod, PTC’s data centers in the United States and India had a disparate mix of legacy platforms that couldn’t support the speed, scale, or ambition of the company’s AI development efforts.

“FlexPod is a proven, engineered solution with reference architectures,” says Michael Blake, vice president of information technology at PTC. “It provides tight integration with our Cisco ACI network, it’s easily managed with Cisco Intersight, and it has enabled us to significantly consolidate our data center footprint.”

It also supercharged the company’s R&D efforts.

“Development and testing activities that used to take two-plus hours are now performed in minutes,” Blake says.

The company’s software builds, automated testing, performance benchmarks, and quality assurance testing have all accelerated. And PTC leaders say their solutions have reached a new level of maturity as a result. Today, Servigistics customers are experiencing:

• 6–35% better asset uptime
• 10–35% inventory reduction
• $10–45M in cost avoidance

Buoyed by its recent progress and technological underpinnings, PTC continues to push its AI-driven Servigistics capabilities forward.

“We continue to ingest and analyze more data, from real-time equipment telematics to LLM [large language model] algorithms to weather patterns and location variables. Doing so enables us to make predictions at the serial number level and help our AI become more accurate and autonomous,” Dr. Agrawal says. “Cisco technologies have been instrumental in our ability to accelerate R&D and innovation, and they will continue to be an essential enabler of our product development efforts.”