CONTACT Elements—The Platform You Might Not Know You Need: Stay Sharp Episode 101

In Stay Sharp Episode 101, Digital Product Software Series: CONTACT Software Elements, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant dive deeper into an offering Jonathan calls Germany’s best-kept secret. To do so they welcome the Chief Product and Technology Officer from CONTACT Software, Frank Patz-Brockmann. CONTACT was introduced in a recent episode, Stay Sharp Episode 98: Digital Product Series – Who Is CONTACT Software, but this time the focus is on how the CONTACT Elements platform is unique among manufacturing industry software.

The Elevator Pitch for CONTACT Elements

The most compelling aspect of CONTACT Elements is its modularity. Customers choose exactly what they need from an array of composable application components that cover everything from PLM and engineering change control to project management and manufacturing operations. Think of Elements as a periodic table, Frank explains, but “all of the elements are actually application modules that we can combine to build solutions that cover PLM needs or project management needs.”

The platform not only delivers the key pieces for PLM, but also all the components you’ll need for IoT, IIoT, MES, and MOM. Frank describes the evolution of the platform as starting with smart products and feeding their data back to the lifecycle management system. Over time, they added more and more capabilities to the system that have really turned it into an MES tool. “If you wanted to put it in a category of solutions, you could look at it as PLM-capable,” Jonathan says. “Or you can also look at the other pieces you might recognize as MES, as MOM, as IoT. And the interesting part there is [they are] all on a platform which is connected with these data models that understand each other.”

That communication between platforms is another differentiator, because connectivity is such a critical issue in the PLM space. With other solutions, integration between platforms can be a challenge, but with CONTACT Elements, it’s seamless. Jonathan notes, “An issue we hear is closing the loop between manufacturing back to engineering. For so many, it’s a challenge because PLM and MES are on different platforms, different tool sets … it’s interesting that you’ve solved it by saying, we have one platform that addresses both.” The answer lies in the homogeneous technology platform at the heart of Elements. “All the elements are running on the same technology and they live in the same data space, everything can be linked,” Frank says. “It’s very easy to get from an item in the item master on the PLM side to all the production orders that are currently running for that item, and then to the data that the machines have created when producing that item and so on.”

Customers Have Always Been the Focus

As Frank talks about what sets CONTACT Elements apart from other platforms, he often returns to the company’s close partnership with customers as their foundation. He explains, “We are in very intense discussions with our customers about their needs and what their pain actually is in the processes. And that is where we learn things.” In fact, the company only built out its MES capabilities because they had a large partner that needed them—a partner that is now running more than 20 production sites worldwide with the Elements platform. But CONTACT is careful not to try to do everything for everyone. “We are more about getting at the data that is coming out of the manufacturing process and then being able to use the data and feed that back into the product lifecycle,” Frank says. “Just making sense of what is going on.”

Another way they keep customer needs at the forefront is by prioritizing customer flexibility. They offer a variety of deployment models—on-premise, software as a service (SaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS)—which customers can move between with ease as their needs change. They also allow customers to customize their own elements within the CONTACT Elements platform. Frank explains, “You can basically do the same things we do for your own Elements. The technology is completely open in that regard. So you see all the APIs, you can even see how we did things or how we created things. You can see the information model and the business logic, what is going on.”

Learn More About CONTACT Elements

The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including how the fact that Europe’s regulations are built into Elements can give U.S. manufacturers a head start on future needs, why Frank thinks MOM describes the CONTACT Elements platform better than the other related acronyms, and more.

Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 101: Digital Product Software Series: CONTACT Software Elements and join us each week for a new podcast.