AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Accelerate Product Development and Reduce Costs with Tech Mahindra’s Cloud-Based PLM Solution on AWS
By Abhijit Ghaskadbi, Head, Manufacturing Solutions & Portfolio Offering – Tech Mahindra
By Kaweldeep Singh, Principal Consultant, Manufacturing – Tech Mahindra
By Amit Kumar, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Shonil Kulkarni, Sr. Manager, Solutions Architect – AWS
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| Tech Mahindra |
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Industry 4.0 has revolutionized the end-to-end operating model of industrial customers that are challenged by increased product complexity and changing customer expectations, leading to highly customized products and price competition. With this evolution, organizations are eager to remain competitive and sustain their business success.
Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a software technology that helps industries develop and maintain products through their entire lifecycle—from concept and design through development, launch, support, and retirement. Enterprises that have deployed PLM software on-premises are looking to reduce the cost, time, and risk associated with product development.
In this post, you will learn how Tech Mahindra can help to accelerate and modernize the PLM deployment leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities. Tech Mahindra’s Engineering on Cloud – PLM solution helps manufacturers recognize efficiency improvements by optimizing the total cost of PLM system ownership, while reducing the time, cost, and risk associated with product development.
Tech Mahindra is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Service Provider (MSP) with the AWS Manufacturing and Industrial Services Competency that specializes in digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering solutions.
Customer Challenges
Industrial customers are looking at ways to accelerate product lifecycle management and reduce the infrastructure cost associated with deployment and management of PLM systems. They want improved user experience, faster time to market, enhanced scalability, high availability, and the ability to securely access the system from anywhere.
Some of the key requirements from PLM customers are:
- Cost efficiency and scalability on-demand.
- Increased security and data protection.
- Efficient product release cycle and quicker time-to-market.
- Deployment automation and less operational overhead.
- Flexibility to access the solution at any time, from anywhere.
- Data fabric across data silos and connected business systems.
Solution Overview
Tech Mahindra’s Engineering on Cloud – PLM solution gives you a one-stop, cloud-native tool to centralize your product data management and PLM with integration to enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
The solution provides a roadmap to implement PLM software to deliver agility, performance, data security, cost efficiency, and accelerated innovation to customer engineering research and development functions. It’s an AWS cloud-native solution to accelerate and modernize product development and lifecycle management, enabling customers to optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO), improve collaboration, time to market, and overall efficiency for managing and operating a PLM system.
The solution is customizable with multiple built-in layers for different application functions. A multi-tier architecture helps with independent scaling of each layer, and with resiliency by avoiding single point of failure.
Figure 1 – High-level architecture diagram.
Described below are the high-level components of the solutions and their respective functions:
- PLM application: This layer contains multiple application components that are deployed across multiple servers.
- Web layer: This consists of a web application server and active workspace gateway. These components are deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with an Application Load Balancer (ALB) at the frontend.
- Enterprise layer: This consists of multiple application sub-components serving different business functions. Five application components are deployed on EC2, and four application components are hosted leveraging container-based deployment.
- Resource layer: This consists of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) which are used to store the application data and shared across different services.
- Deployment pipeline: The solution follows a modular architecture with rapid automated deployment leveraging infrastructure as code (IaC) and DevOps best practices to enhance operational excellence. CI/CD is built leveraging a complete set of AWS developer tools to accelerate software development and release cycles.
- Observability: This layer consists of Tech Mahindra’s SMART (smart monitoring and resolution tool) observability solution natively built on AWS using monitoring and observability services. It provides a single pane of glass view into the systems running the applications, and integrates logs, metrics, and traces in an intuitive, user-friendly dashboard for a wide range of use cases. The SMART observability solution facilitates faster and smarter services management and monitoring, thereby enabling improved service-level agreement (SLA) management.
- Management and governance: This layer consists of services such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Management and Governance services which helps to enable, provision, and operate customer environment for business agility and governance control.
The solution is built leveraging AWS architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems:
- Amazon RDS is leveraged as the database tier and configured with a multi-Availability Zone (AZ) deployment, which creates a primary database and synchronously replicates data to a standby instance in different AZs.
- Amazon EFS hosts the resource tier where application data is stored. It’s configured to use the standard storage class, which by default provides redundancy by storing data across multiple AZs and provides a high level of durability.
- The web layer and most of the enterprise application layer are configured to use Amazon EC2 with auto scaling. As workloads grow, EC2 provides scalable compute capacity and reduces the time it takes to procure and set up new server instances. Additionally, Application Load Balancer distributes traffic across multiple AZs to improve scalability and availability. Several of the application components are run as containers on EC2 and redundancy is configured. For some components, redundancy is configured in Active-Passive mode, which is due to the application’s nature.
- The principle of least privilege is applied throughout the solution, limiting each resource’s access to only what’s required to complete its function. All communication over internet is SSL/TLS enabled for in-transit encryption and data stores used by application are encrypted at rest using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). All resources are deployed in private subnets and only Application Load Balancer is in the public subnet.
- The solution is configured to use the SMART observability solution, which leverages AWS monitoring and observability services for logs, metrics, and traces to provide the application monitoring and fault remediation.
Solution Benefits
- Faster time to market: Modular architecture with rapid automated deployment leveraging IaC and DevOps best practices to enhance operational excellence and expedite product development.
- Cost efficiency: Right-sized, optimized, and performant AWS cloud-based architecture helps to lower direct costs and increase resource utilization with AWS services.
- Scalability and security: Secure and scalable PLM system configuration and deployment on AWS focuses on operational excellence.
- Resiliency and reliability: Highly available and resilient solution with reduced cost and lower TCO.
- Reduced maintenance and operational overhead: Reduced operational complexity of deploying, operating, and upgrading the application and underlaying infrastructure services.
- Streamlined collaboration: Integrated solution including all engineering and design workloads and applications to improve real-time collaboration from anywhere and everywhere.
- Digital thread: Data orchestration capability across different engineering and design workloads like PLM, Computer Aided Design (CAD), and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE).
Summary
Product lifecycle management (PLM) is at the core of manufacturing operations for any industrial customers and helps customers achieve their current and future product innovation.
Tech Mahindra’s Engineering on Cloud – PLM solution offers a roadmap to deploy PLM system configuration on AWS, focusing on operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. The solution accelerates time to market, reduces the development costs by improving PLM performance, and enables real-time collaboration across people and processes.
To learn more, reach out to Tech Mahindra and schedule a demo.
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Tech Mahindra – AWS Partner Spotlight
Tech Mahindra is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that specializes in digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering solutions.