Hello, and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Stephanie Caldwell, Senior Marketing Program Manager here at PTC. Before we get started, I'd like to cover a few housekeeping items to ensure a smooth experience in the ON24 console. At the bottom of your screen, there are multiple application widgets you can use. All widgets are movable and resizable, so feel free to adjust them to get the most out of your desktop space. You can expand your viewing area or maximize it to full screen by clicking on the arrows in the top right corner. For the best audio quality, please make sure your computer speakers or headset are turned on and the volume is up so you can hear the presenters. If you experience any delay or interruption in your audio or video, you can refresh your browser by hitting F5 on your keyboard. If you have any questions during today's webinar, you may submit them into the Q&A widget at any time. Check out the Resources widget, where you will find more great content to complement today's discussion. This webinar will be available for replay. You will be able to access the replay on demand shortly following the conclusion of the webinar. We are excited for today's content, and with that, let's get started. Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Trish Guerrera, and I have the pleasure of introducing this webinar featuring iRobot. Today you'll see Mark Taber, VP of Marketing at PTC, and Scott Morris, Windchill Manager at iRobot, talk about how iRobot weathered a series of challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic that included supply chain disruptions, strict cost targets, and unpredictable swings in demand. You'll also hear how iRobot manages component selection, drives efficient product reuse, and collaborates with contract manufacturers using a part-centric approach to product development. Enjoy. Scott, you've seen it all at iRobot. I love the initial story that I've heard about iRobot, where it was the company was founded to build a robot for the rover for the moon exploration. And sort of the quote that I saw was, you know, "Build a robot, go to the moon, make a movie." The company has obviously come a long way over that time. If you could set the context for us and help us understand about, you know, maybe a little bit where iRobot came from and where iRobot is today. Yeah, absolutely. It was before my time, but, you know, Colin and a college colleague started the business many years ago with the idea of improving quality of life for people through robotics. They built lots of robotic projects, and it took them a number of years to get to something that we would consider a commercial success that homeowners understood, and that was with the launch of Roomba. It was somewhere around my first or second year with the company that we had a one million party, and that was one million connected robots in consumer houses, which was pretty amazing. I think that number has scaled significantly since then. iRobot has about 1,000 employees globally, headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, with some design offices in California, and then distribution and manufacturing around the world. It has to be a huge number of overall robots. The company literally invented the category of robotic vacuums and has had tremendous success. You are no longer alone in that business. You have competitors. You obviously are not resting on your laurels. I see new products coming out, you know, all the time. Maybe give a sense, you know, I realize the business has been up and down with the pandemic and all different things, and we had component shortages, you know, out there that I am sure have impacted you and tariffs and all these other things. Give a sense of maybe challenges from a perspective of externally, but also internally. Yeah, so let's start with the pandemic, right? We were, as a business, iRobot was trying to make decisions and plans on what the business would look like for that year. One of the first things we did was close a development program for a new product that would have come out that year in expectation for low consumer turnout. At the same time, the company started to dial back manufacturing, assuming there would be less of a demand for products. Really what happened is there was a huge demand for products at the beginning of the pandemic, and people were suddenly home with their families, not looking to vacuum and clean all the time. Suddenly there were many more people in the house contributing to, you know, the need to clean up. iRobot had a very big year that year because of the very high consumer demand. Since then, we've struggled a little bit with the supply chain and being able to get the required components to build the electronics for iR obot, right? In some cases, it could be a primary component, it could be a secondary component, it could be how we source them or where we source them from and what geography, so we don't have to ship them around the world to get them to places. It's been very difficult, especially with the primary circuits that we install software onto to run those robots. When those are no longer available, it's up to iRobot as a company to find and source a replacement, get software for it, conduct all the product testing to ensure that that product meets or exceeds the quality of the original product and can build in tandem both of those variants of exactly the same product. It sounds like the pace of R&D is just like incredible, right? You know, how do you keep that edge? Maybe I'll maybe shift the discussion over to the things that you've done. Like you mentioned variants of robots. What percentage of, let's say, a new robot that you come out with is similar to one before? In other words, reuse. How does that play into your product development? Yeah, so it really depends on the requirements for the new product. The engineering and product team may look at existing product portfolio and realize that there are some elements or components from those products that could be reused, and they may target them as such. They may want to use a drive base, a drive train, a control system, a vision system, whatever it is. They may take a few of those pieces. The nice thing is those items all exist in Windchill. They're all structured content. They can pull the part structures. They can pull all the associated CAD, make copies of them, and make it their starting point. Yes, we never have to start from zero when it's a new iteration, new variation of a Roomba product, which is really great for the engineers because they don't start at zero. They start much further ahead and can then just focus on what makes this particular new product and new product development different from what we had previously, right? Let's focus on what sets it to be unique in the category and focus on that and make it just as good as the rest of the product. In that vein, how do you help them to not duplicate a part? Not because, you know, they're trying to duplicate a part, but they just can't find the right component that they need or they don't see what they could use and reuse in the next generation of product. Our primary approach for that is classification, right? We use Windchill classification to identify different categories and types of components and systems throughout the entire database. Simple things like fasteners and connectors in electrical components completely make sense. They are single components that go in. We also use that same classification to identify key systems within the robot, right? For instance, if we had something like a structure or a drive train or assembly, we are able to break that down a little bit finer. To go along with that, teams can also find the very specific item that they are looking for, but also go over to where used and find out where that component has already been used in another product or in a different product and how prevalent it is. Maybe if it's just a one-time use, we want to look at something that is used more frequently or used more commonly, or was its use, was it a bit old? Right? There are times when, yes, we definitely use this component, but we used it five or 10 years ago. Let's go look into it and see what it has for replacements and does it have alternate substitutes or manufacturing parts that are more modern that we should use in the current product. Now, at the same time, are they looking at, let's say, the risk of using a component? You mentioned, you know, supply shortages and things like that. What sort of information do they have available on the risk side? Yeah, so built into Windchill, we use the Silicon Expert's connector. So anyone can go to Bill of Materials and run Bill of Materials health check through Silicon Expert. And that will give them a couple of categories of reports that will let them know the status of the various components, the risk of those components, and risk being a combination of things such as availability, cost, age, or other factors that could play into whether or not that component is available. You said other factors, and I'm just thinking about like compliance and meeting like local requirements or sustainability. Yeah, from a compliance perspective, we use the Compliance Map as our primary tool to capture all of that information. We have a nightly connection between Windchill and Compliance Map that will take our SKU, Bill of Materials, push it over to Compliance Map. That is where we are going through all of the efforts to get the material information, the supplier information, everything that we need to assure that our product meets regulatory compliance in all the locations that we anticipate to have it in the market. There's a wealth of information inside the compliance tool. We only bring back a handful of verdicts that the engineers need to know before they make a decision on a component. If they would like to get more information, there is a link to directly go to the C- Map tool and get that information. When it comes to cost, we use another system to do cost, and that's Impact ECS. We send the information from Windchill over to Impact ECS to make sure that it is current and updated, and our cost management team takes care of all of the sourcing, supply, and demand planning for all of those components so we can set pricing accordingly. Are you doing that on each variant of your product? And like, how do you look at this over time, you know, and see how the cost is evolving over time? All right, when it comes to cost, iRobot tries to collect that information as early as possible in the design life cycle so that we can achieve the cost target for a given product when it comes to market, right? That's critical for any company building a new product. If you can't achieve your cost target, then you can't achieve your profit target. It is critical for us to make those things achievable and visible to everyone in the process. Once a product has made it to release, iRobot will continuously look at how we can improve the product cost in order to improve profit, improve product features, and product capabilities by looking at other technologies, advancements in components, and other systems that we could build into the robot that would provide the product at a lower cost. I would assume you're doing quality testing in parallel and testing each of those configurations. Yeah, the headquarters building in Bedford has a pretty extensive quality lab. We have a number of home labs that you can go into that have a home interior with all the various rooms that we do testing in. We also have a lot of automated testing internally and have started to use more robotics to complete our testing process. Instead of having an individual with a product in a test system taking them on and off, we can queue up a matrix of robots of different types and different styles and run them through a sequence of testing by moving that cart from one test station to the next, by having the robot pick and place, run test, put it back, and go again. You are tracking and testing every configuration of a robot in this manner. Yeah, I'm going back to the variability question. There are really two kinds of methods that we could talk about there. There is this testing program that is happening at the headquarters building to make sure the quality that is coming off the manufacturing line meets or exceeds our expectations. A lot of the equipment that goes into our contract manufacturers is built by iRobot. The build stations, the test stations, the software check, the mechanical checks, the physical checks, even the packaging checks are all part of that process. We collect that data and information in our manufacturing execution system so we know what those serial numbers are, when they are built, what was included in that, how that BOM might be different from another product built with another contract manufacturer. We can always work with the consumer through customer support to get them the information they need for their particular product. Interesting. You bring up contract manufacturers, and maybe to ask you a bit more on how you're working with those contract manufacturers, especially with the rate of change that we just talked about. I'm interested in first article inspection. Yeah, so let's talk about first article inspection. That's our primary means of taking an iRobot-owned plastic injection molding tool, having it installed with a manufacturer, and starting to create plastic parts, right? That process is custom inside of iRobot, and we use Windchill to manage that. There is a data collection report that we have with the manufacturer and with the manufacturing engineers that they can validate and confirm first components coming off of this tool, send it back to iRobot through Windchill, collaborate with the engineering team, the production team, and make sure everybody has a view of the critical data to make sure that the first article inspection documents have passed, been approved, and we can move into production, right? That used to be a paper process or an electronic paper process through the spreadsheet that got emailed to all the right people. Now it's a controlled process that we run through Windchill to manage completely. When it comes to collaborating with the contract manufacturers, our process usually starts with going to Windchill and generating a bill of materials report, which we can generate in various formats. Most importantly, we need to output from Windchill a bill of materials report that would include all the replacements, the alternates, the substitutes, all of the manufacturer components and vendor components that we use throughout a particular product so that they have a complete view of which items are regionally specific to them, which suppliers are regionally specific to them, and which manufacturers iRobot prefers, right, over the available ones that we could potentially use. It is a great tool to communicate with them. That usually begins our initial start on manufacturing. From there, we have to communicate any changes, right? If we're in an early prototype build, there's going to be lots of changes and things are a little more fluid, but we'll still record those using Windchill change management, right? We'll do an ECR, we'll process an ECN, some work will be done. We're starting a very new process where we take the change notice and create a Windchill package from that, which collects all the associated content that comes with that ECN. It could be the mechanical drawings, mechanical model, it could be cabling, it could be harnesses, it could be a printed circuit board, its components, or the PCBA. All of that information gets collected in the package. We share it to a project in ProjectLink that the contract manufacturer has access to. Now, instead of needing to invite them into our Windchill proper with access to more things than we really want them to have access to, we can exclusively share the change and change objects with them so that we're all communicating in the same way using the same process inside our PLM application. Maybe another area that you just made me think about is just the overall product configuration. It sounds like, you know, you have a pretty comprehensive cross-discipline bill of material that's including the electronic parts, the software, the mechanical parts, drawings, packaging, all of that together. Do I have that right? Yeah, absolutely. If we look at what we refer to as a SKU bill of materials, it includes everything. It includes the core robot, the face plate, the bottom plate, the battery package, the accessory, everything that goes in the box, the documentation, the packaging, the labeling for the location in which it will be sold. It's all included and all of that information is captured in Windchill. Going back inside of R&D, how do you leverage Windchill, let's say, working with the electronic design tools, so the ECAD tools, or, you know, how are you doing that on the mechanical side? Right, so from a mechanical perspective, we use Creo exclusively for all of our mechanical designs. Creo is our primary CAD system. It's how we generate 3D models, assemblies, drawings, and all of the artifacts that go with the mechanical design. That is completely integrated directly into Windchill. From Creo, I can connect to Windchill, I can find the items that I need, and I can put them back in as they are changed, iterated, and modified over time. With electrical components, iRobot uses Altium. We use the Altium Designer product for making the authoring changes, and we are currently using the Altium Nexus PLM solution to provide this single location for all of the electrical engineers to design, build, collaborate in a single space all of their work in progress content. When they feel that their progress has achieved a particular point that they can release it for early production, pre-production, or production, we can publish that information back to Windchill. We still use Windchill as our primary source of truth for both mechanical and electrical. We just use Altium NEXUS as our primary source for the electrical engineering team to do their collaboration. The rest of the company will consume or collect information about the electrical designs, components, schematics directly from Windchill. Once you leave R&D, how do all the other stakeholders leverage this rich digital product definition that you've put together? At iRobot, we have a lot of occasional users of Windchill who might come in to find a schematic for an electrical design or find a particular drawing for a mechanical design or collect some information about suppliers and other pieces. It is the primary source of information that the business uses to find all the data that we need. In addition to that, we also use the Windchill REST API to take those very specific SKU BOMs out and store them in a data warehouse where we can use advanced BI tools that help support things that are across multiple products or across a family of products, right? If we wanted to do some resource planning or component planning based on demand and location for manufacturing, we can use the BI tools to make some of those things happen. Towards the end of 2023 or start of 2024, we would like to get ThingWorx Navigate deployed for those same casual users who are not in the tool as frequently to give them a much simpler and easier way to access the information that they need the most. You've mentioned a tremendous amount of things that you're doing and support for the R&D community with your contract manufacturers, with your suppliers. It must have taken quite a bit of organization change through the years. You've been there for 30 years. Maybe describe that journey for us a bit. iRobot started with Windchill and Creo right in the very early days. It was the hottest CAD package available on the market. They wanted to start with the best tool that they could. They were an early adopter of Windchill. You know, the PLM footprint at iRobot didn't start with all of the tools at once, right? It started with CAD data management. It moved into generating part structures to link that CAD to it. Over time, PTC also advanced the capabilities in the PLM platform. We got things like classification and supplier management and other bits and pieces that we were able to use to expand and increase the amount of information we were storing in the PLM tools. It is really an evolutionary journey both for the business and for the products and really staying current with where PTC is in the PLM solutions, taking advantage of the newest capabilities as soon as they're available to make sure we have the best information we can possibly have. Thank you, everyone, for watching this webinar and learning about iRobot's journey to product development with Windchill. Have a great rest of your day.