IoT & Connectivity Tips

The long-awaited manufacturing solution,  ThingWorx Digital Performance Management (DPM), has arrived! Announced at PTC’s  Manufacturing Live event, DPM provides key use cases around overall equipment effectiveness and real-time performance monitoring, while delivering insights with analytics and automated bottleneck identification tools. DPM gives customers clear insight into where and what to fix to drive efficiencies. Composed of modular building blocks with a foundation on the ThingWorx platform, DPM is easily configurable and customizable for closed-loop problem solving that drives productivity.   Let’s take a deeper look into what DPM is and how you can implement it to ensure your investment in the ThingWorx platform and digital transformation delivers business impact.   Monitor in real-time with Production Dashboard The Production Dashboard allows for automated or manual data entry of reason codes with a simple interface for limited disruption. Rather than providing front-line workers with the typical, difficult to understand, percentage based KPIs, Production Dashboard standardizes all losses, so operators can proactively resolve issues during production. You can configure this dashboard to collect granular data and allow opportunities for continuous improvement in process tracking.     Focus with Bottleneck Analysis Bottleneck analysis automatically identifies bottlenecks across the manufacturing process. Identifying bottlenecks can help you prioritize the highest-impact opportunities in the business process. This saves you having to manually identify and analyze potential issues and frees you up to work on other projects.   Prioritize with Time Loss Waterfall and Analyze with Loss Reason Pareto Monitor and analyze performance with data visualizations that help you pinpoint root causes and suggest improvements. Bring together your siloed data into one system and create a standard for how performance is measured and reported.   Improve with Action Tracker Action Tracker allows you to create continuous improvement actions tied to real production losses, to ensure your actions are having positive impact and return.  Create a digital workspace for teams to collaborate and learn from each other. Plus, you can track the improvements delivered through each individual action, so you can drill down and create transparency of work being done.   Confirm value delivered with Scorecard (Available in Later Versions) With the Scorecard feature, you can leverage a standard scorecard for enterprise wide KPIs to summarize factory health and compare similar factory operations. Use the scorecard to create trending and reporting that can be filtered based on the audience you are presenting data to. The scorecard gives you a consistent view that measures performance across the network and drives visibility and accountability across your business.   How do you plan to leverage DPM or the building blocks that make it up? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the first manufacturing solution from PTC.   Stay connected, Rachel   

ThingWorx community,   As part of a continuous re-evaluation of our third-party software requirements, we regularly add and remove support for versions of operating systems, persistence providers, and web browsers.   On this note, we are planning to end support for Ubuntu 18.04 beginning with the ThingWorx release targeted for mid-CY2022. Per its release cycle, Ubuntu will move version 18.04 into Extended Security Maintenance at this point, meaning it will no longer receive regular maintenance updates.   PTC will continue to support Ubuntu 20.04 for the immediate future and will consider supporting Ubuntu 22.04 once it becomes Generally Available (GA).   Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.   Regards,   Walter Haydock ThingWorx Product Management

ThingWorx community,   As part of a continuous re-evaluation of our third-party software requirements, we regularly add and remove support for versions of operating systems, persistence providers, and web browsers.   On this note, for the ThingWorx release after 9.2 (currently targeted for the end of CY 2021), we are planning to end support for Windows Server 2016. Already five years old, this product has generally been replaced by Windows Server 2019 in common usage.   As per Microsoft’s published lifecycle, this version will be going out of "Mainstream Support" approximately one year after the aforementioned ThingWorx release. PTC will continue to support Windows Server 2019 for the immediate future, and will consider supporting Windows Server 2022 once it becomes Generally Available (GA).   Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.   Regards,   Walter Haydock ThingWorx Product Management

Hello community,   I'm happy to announce that I released GitBackup Extension 4.1.0 with some nice help from the community (special thanks to Tanguy Parmentier who provided all the localization export functionality). Many thanks for the people who provided feedback allowing this features to be prioritized.   Version 4.1.0 brings several new features to the table: (Finally) Allows the user to specify a subset of Entities for Export Allows importing a single Entity from the Workspace, so it’s easier now to checkout a specific commit in the past and import that file version for testing. Adds the capability to Export localization tokens filtered by a specific prefix - overridable by you at export time. Adds a Log screen that contains log entries for some of the most used methods that caused silent fails. Closed remote branches are auto-pruned. Further cleans the ThingWorx XML source files, by removing the ModelPersistenceProviderPackage. The Main Mashup UI is slightly redesigned: there's a new Manage tab which holds the Settings, Delete Git Thing and more. The Export Mashup UX is improved: export buttons are no longer visible if you don't select a project. Supports ThingWorx 9.0 Two separate releases: one for 8.4&8.5 and one for 9.0 The documentation was updated and I suggest further reading the release notes and specifically the ones regarding the new Log and prune capabilities. In addition, the mechanism that cleans the source code is extensible, and most of the entities are editable, allowing you to tweak it to your own usecase.   The Extesion source code is available here: https://github.com/PTCInc/thingworx-gitbackup-extension The importable Extension zip files are available here: https://github.com/PTCInc/thingworx-gitbackup-extension/releases   Special note for people using ThingWorx 9.0: in this version some internal ThingWorx SDK Java methods changed their signature, and this required me to build a special releases for 9.0. The extension I built for 9.0 won't run correctly in 8.4/8.5 and also the reverse. As such, you will always see two releases for each GitBackup version: one for 9.0 and one for the 8.4/8.5. My ask for you is the following: don't click on the latest release Github shows - that will always send you to the latest release, which might not be compatible with the ThingWorx version you are using always use the link above to choose the Extension compatible with your ThingWorx version read carefully which release you download. The title contains the ThingWorx version compatible with that release.   This Extension is licensed under the MIT Licence and is provided as-is and without warranty or support. It is not part of the PTC product suite.   Taking into consideration the statement above: please read first the documentation if you encounter any problems, search first for closed issues, and if none is found for your problem, raise a new issue in GitHub's issue system: https://github.com/PTCInc/thingworx-gitbackup-extension/issues do not open PTC Tech Support tickets for this Extension   For OOTB Git support in the ThingWorx platform, please raise a ThingWorx Idea in the PTC Community here https://community.ptc.com/t5/ThingWorx-Ideas/idb-p/thingworxideas   Thank you!

We are bringing the Liveworx UX Lab to you this year! Contribute to the design and development of PTC’s IoT & AR products from the comfort of your home.   Participate in online 1:1 session with PTC Researchers and Designers to take our prototypes & conceptual designs for a spin, share your expertise to directly impact the experience of our future products.   For all Liveworx 2020 UX Lab sessions, click here   IoT & AR session links: SOLUTION CENTRAL: User Management SOLUTION CENTRAL: PTC Solution Deployment SERVICE: Remote Monitoring Solution THINGWORX: Managing Building Blocks in Composer THINGWORX KEPWARE EDGE: Container Based Software at Scale EDGE: Next Generation IoT Edge (Asset) Manager THINGWORX: Asset Modeling DIGITAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SOLUTION: Bottleneck ID & Balanced Scorecard MANUFACTURING: PTC Solution Strategy using Building Blocks IMPLEMENTING AR and IOT: Successes and Difficulties VUFORIA EDITOR: Authoring Work Instructions VUFORIA EDITOR: Authoring Work Containing Augmented Reality

Hello ThingWorx community!   I’d like to invite you to join me and our ThingWorx experts for an exclusive webinar on October 30 at 11:00 AM (EDT) to explore the transformative potential of Agentic AI within the ThingWorx Industrial IoT and AI platform. In this session, you’ll gain insights into ThingWorx’s AI strategy, focused on delivering actionable intelligence and accelerating digital transformation across the product lifecycle. You’ll also see in action: Hands-on demos integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with ThingWorx 10.X How to enable agentic automation using Model Context Protocol (MCP) Ways to enhance industrial apps with real-time decisions, natural language, and computer vision AI So, register here:   [Webinar]: ThingWorx Innovation With Industrial IoT and AI    Also, here is a personal video invitation message to you all!      Post webinar, please provide your feedback and comments below!    We look forward to having you join us!     Cheers, Ayush Tiwari Director Product Management