Innovator Spotlight: Whirlpool Corporation

By leveraging PTC products to reduce overall system and product complexity, Whirlpool Corporation hopes to improve the lives of its customers, simplify lifecycle processes and gain efficiencies
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How Whirlpool Corporation is transforming with PLM

For Whirlpool Corporation, innovation is inspired by the impact it has on its consumers. Products need to be easier, faster, and more intuitive, improving the customer’s home experience. To achieve its vision, the company realized it had to transform its factories and provide a more efficient product development process throughout the life of its wide portfolio of brands and products. By using Windchill, PTC’s PLM solution, Whirlpool Corporation was able to deploy its digital transformation strategy. In addition, it is exploring other transformative technologies such as digital twin, augmented reality, and data-driven design to extend product lifecycle management (PLM) across the enterprise and bring innovation to its consumers.

The results to date have been significant:

LOWER Product development costs

LOWER

FEWER Engineering changes

FEWER

GREATER Reuse of components and designs

GREATER

IMPROVED Consumer outcomes

IMPROVED

MORE Guided innovation

MORE

HIGHER Quality products

HIGHER

LOWER Complexity

LOWER

BETTER Uptime/service levels

BETTER

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Challenges: Disjointed systems and processes

With company divisions and employees around the world leveraging different systems and processes, Whirlpool Corporation was struggling to efficiently and consistently deliver innovative products to market. To remain competitive, the company was on a mission to reduce its organizational complexity. Identifying PLM as its central product information source and common system, the manufacturer sought to enable cross-functional and cross-regional collaboration. It also needed to empower stakeholders requiring access to information who were not frequent users of the systems its development and engineering teams utilized.

By better managing and sharing product-related data upstream and downstream, Whirlpool Corporation hoped to improve productivity, speed time to market, and eliminate cause for supply chain disruption and brand reputation challenges.


Solution: Advancing its technology agenda

Whirlpool Corporation is working with PTC to advance its technology agenda through a strong partnership and tools that enable the manufacturer to tie all areas of the company together. With Windchill PLM as the foundation, Whirlpool Corporation gains a single source of truth for product data and is able to implement best practices for CAD management, BOM management, requirements management, and systems modeling. This foundation lays the groundwork for the manufacturer to further extend its technology innovation around augmented reality, virtual reality, and connected products.

Windchill enables a collaborative environment cross-functionally and cross-regionally within Whirlpool Corporation. The company can connect information from its appliances to the ThingWorx platform and feed that information back into the PLM environment for a closed-loop system. By creating a feedback loop of information, designers are empowered to build and modify products that better satisfy consumer needs.

ThingWorx Navigate provides user-friendly, role-based access to this information so the right person—even non-frequent users of Windchill or SAP—gets the right information at the right time.

The digital thread and digital twin make it possible to more easily and quickly make data-driven decisions. And by extrapolating the digital twin into the augmented reality space, the company can provide data to the service industry in new ways while offering its consumers ways to experience products virtually in their own home.

Implementation: Building and connecting the digital thread foundation

Lifecycle and configuration management

By using PLM as the centralized data source Whirlpool Corporation is able to drive efficiencies in BOM management, requirements management, BOM transformation (EBOM, MBOM, SBOM), and testing and validation.

Accelerating innovation by enabling a model-based enterprise

To keep pace with the speed of innovation in the market, Whirlpool Corporation is transitioning from a document-based approach to a model-based enterprise. This ensures all stakeholders are calling upon the same data.

Maintaining a competitive edge with enterprise PLM and connected devices

With ThingWorx Navigate and digital twin technology, employees, no matter their role, can access product data and product usage information from connected products to make more informed decisions that better satisfy customer demands.

Lifecycle and configuration management By using PLM as the centralized data source Whirlpool Corporation is able to drive efficiencies in BOM management, requirements management, BOM transformation (EBOM, MBOM, SBOM), and testing and validation. Accelerating innovation by enabling a model-based enterprise To keep pace with the speed of innovation in the market, Whirlpool Corporation is transitioning from a document-based approach to a model-based enterprise. This ensures all stakeholders are calling upon the same data. Maintaining a competitive edge with enterprise PLM and connected devices With ThingWorx Navigate and digital twin technology, employees, no matter their role, can access product data and product usage information from connected products to make more informed decisions that better satisfy customer demands.

Demonstrations

Lifecycle and process management and configurability

Learn how to manage configurability of model-based systems engineering, bill of materials, and CAD data with BOM management. See how to provide a platform structure for strategic design, management, and validation of product variants while keeping downstream teams aligned with BOM transformation.

Data-driven design

See how to leverage data from smart, connected products to make more informed engineering decisions.

Digital traceability and systems engineering

Establish ways of unifying and aligning stakeholders across engineering domains. Learn how to use digital traceability to create a digital thread from requirements specifications to systems modeling and bill of materials.

Augmented reality

View first-hand variant-specific AR design review and visualization, as well as process plan visualization.
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