Manufacturers face a new world where digital technologies are expected to drive all kinds of products. As industrial products and appliances become smarter, companies need to change their design approach. In the future, the market will expect products (such as refrigeration installations or air conditioning systems), to do more —even interact with users. High-end industrial companies are increasingly focused on continuously improving the quality of products and components, as well as standardizing production processes and products. To do so, they need more fluid business processes, up-to-date technologies, agile development and continuous innovation to reinvent products and services that serve changing markets.

LU-VE Group, the world's third largest manufacturer in the air heat exchanger field (listed on the Milan Stock Exchange - MTA), was looking for new solutions to standardize design processes and production (refrigeration, process cooling and air conditioning) across 16 manufacturing sites in nine countries. LU-VE grew at a fast pace and required better, centralized control of design processes and tools to support collaborative design. In particular, it needed to improve coordination among different plants and technical offices around the world in order to avoid redundancies and speed products to market.

To top it off, LU-VE had acquired new companies, adding product design processes to the complexity of integration. It needed a new model to manage collaborative design and increase product standardization so it could use modular production processes at all plants around the world.

LU-VE Group collaborated with Accenture to transform product design with centralized processes and digital tools. The Industry X Digital Service Factory operating model helped accelerate digital transformation with a customizable set of end-to-end digital execution capabilities to identify, design, develop, test, pilot and launch new digital products and services. Our transformation work spanned strategy, organizational and process design, systems integration, cloud infrastructure and application maintenance.

At the Accenture Customer Innovation Network in Milan, the team identified strategic ideas to tackle LU-VE's digital transformation journey. As part of the journey, we created a centralized process model and helped select and configure a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution, based on Siemens Teamcenter, to be used across Italy, China, Czech Republic, Finland, India, Poland, Russia, Sweden and USA. With the new processes and solutions, LU-VE can share product data across all company divisions and business units. It has also changed its design methodology from 2D to 3D. LU-VE is extending the system to the sales department and plans to do so in procurement and production.

In addition to digitalizing LU-VE's PLM processes, the team simplified its IT infrastructure. LU-VE previously had its infrastructure in third-party data centers, which caused problems with system performance, data loss and business continuity. We helped migrate its entire IT architecture, including the Siemens Teamcenter solution and SAP enterprise resource planning system, onto an AWS cloud infrastructure and continue to manage the network. The migration is helping LU-VE attain its goal of moving to a systems-as-a-service model.