Optimize Product Development with Teamcenter

Digital transformation uses technologies like low code development, product lifecycle management (PLM), artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and augmented reality (AR) to digitize manual processes and create opportunities for innovation. It can help businesses work smarter, build better customer relationships, and simplify operations.

But it’s not always easy to see how these technologies translate into real-world impact. Without concrete examples, digital transformation can feel overwhelming and abstract.

This guide explores 7 examples of digital transformation from companies that are solving problems and preparing for the future.

Short on Time? Here Are 7 Digital Transformation Examples

• Starbucks introduced mobile apps to deliver product recommendations and allow customers to order ahead.
• Goldman Sachs leveraged AI to develop personalized banking products.

• Nel Hydrogen launched a PLM system to centralize engineering data and enhance operational efficiency.

• IKEA introduced augmented reality (AR) so customers can visualize products in their homes.
• UPS built a fleet management system optimized by machine learning to streamline driver routes and reduce operational costs.

• CED implemented low code automation to speed up insurance claims processing by 50%.

• The Mayo Clinic adopted cloud computing for faster patient data sharing, telehealth appointments, and AI-enhanced diagnoses.
  

7 Real-World Digital Transformation Examples

Let’s explore 7 outstanding examples of digital transformation strategies.

Starbucks: Leveraging Mobile Apps to Drive Growth

From a single coffee shop in Seattle, Starbucks has grown into a global coffee empire with more than 38,000 stores worldwide. A key driver of the company’s growth has been its customer-focused mobile apps, launched in 2009.

Initially, the Starbucks app provided basic features like store locations and drink information. But in 2015, Starbucks revolutionized the customer experience with Mobile Order & Pay, enabling customers to order via mobile devices and skip the lines. This innovation addressed a major pain point—long wait times—and improved customer satisfaction by simplifying the ordering process.

Since then, Starbucks has further enhanced customer experiences on mobile with AI-powered features that remember past orders, suggest new products, and deliver personalized promotions.

This digital solution has transformed Starbucks’ business. By 2019, nearly one-third of Starbucks customers used the app for payments, and in 2023, it accounted for 31% of all US sales.

Goldman Sachs: Harnessing Data to Meet Customers’ Financial Needs

Over the past 20 years, banking has shifted from branch-first to online-first as customer expectations evolve. In 2016, Goldman Sachs seized this opportunity and launched Marcus, its first line of personal banking products.

Marcus offers personal loans, savings accounts, certificates of deposit, and credit cards through a fully online platform. AI models allow the platform to analyze vast amounts of data, market trends, and financial risks to tailor each customer’s financial products, rates, and terms.

More recently, Goldman Sachs expanded Marcus’ capabilities, using AI-powered tools to assist customers with portfolio management. By evaluating factors like customers’ risk tolerance, investment goals, age, and savings, the platform recommends personalized investment strategies and asset allocations.

The result is a highly personalized offering that resonates with consumers. By 2022, Marcus had grown to 15 million customers and generated $110 billion in deposits and $19 million in loans. The platform now accounts for nearly 30% of Goldman Sachs’ total deposits.

Nel Hydrogen: Using PLM to Centralize Data and Enhance Operational Efficiency

Nel Hydrogen is a manufacturing company that makes equipment to produce hydrogen through electrolysis. Its products are critical to the green energy revolution, and the company has seen demand skyrocket in recent years.

However, the 97-year-old company’s engineering and manufacturing processes were largely manual, preventing the company from scaling to meet demand. To address this, Nel Hydrogen embarked on a digital transformation effort focused on digitizing manual processes and establishing a cohesive information system for its engineering teams.

In partnership with low code specialist CLEVR and enterprise software provider Siemens, Nel Hydrogen implemented the Teamcenter PLM system.

This new system integrated with Nel Hydrogen’s existing enterprise resource planning software and allowed for seamless sharing of engineering documentation processes and procurement data. It’s also directly integrated with the company’s computer-aided design systems for product design and manufacturing.

Teamcenter enabled Nel Hydrogen to centrally track and share critical product data, increasing the company’s productivity and enabling it to quickly fulfill orders. Now, Nel Hydrogen is in a perfect position to further digitize its operations, such as by adding real-time monitoring to production lines and tracking equipment performance over its full lifespan.

IKEA: Leveraging Augmented Reality to Drive Online Sales

Swedish furniture giant IKEA has traditionally relied on its vast warehouses to attract customers and boost sales. However, in the digital age, competition from online-first marketplaces and retailers like Amazon and Wayfair has pushed the company to reimagine its business models.

As part of its digital transformation journey, IKEA launched a mobile app in 2019 that allows customers to browse and order products while receiving AI-powered personalized product recommendations. For in-store shoppers, the app offers additional features like scanning items for detailed information or saving them to a wishlist.

To enhance the customer experience even more, IKEA introduced augmented reality (AR) tools that let customers visualize furniture in their homes. By capturing an image of a room with their phone, users can digitally position IKEA products to see how they fit and look in the space.

These innovations have significantly contributed to IKEA’s online growth. E-commerce sales skyrocketed from $2 billion in 2017, when AR was first introduced, to $10.4 billion in 2023.

UPS: Optimizing Fleet Management with Machine Learning

As e-commerce sales boomed, UPS faced the challenge of delivering more packages without significantly increasing costs or its carbon footprint. The company turned to digital technology to improve its business processes and efficiency.

In 2012, UPS launched a custom fleet management system optimized with machine learning. The platform analyzes millions of potential routes for each driver, identifying the most efficient options to minimize distance and fuel consumption. Famously, it eliminated most left turns to reduce idle time.

To complement this fleet management system, UPS equipped vehicles with GPS devices that provide turn-by-turn directions while simultaneously feeding data into the company’s route optimization algorithm for continuous improvement.

Thanks to this digital transformation success, UPS saves an estimated 3.3 million gallons of fuel and reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 31,000 metric tons annually. During the peak holiday shipping season, the company boasts an industry-leading on-time delivery rate of 97.5%.

CED: Automating Insurance Claims Handling with Low Code Automation

CED is a European insurance claims manager that handles more than €2.5 billion in claims annually. The company faced growing pains as it took on more claims because its processing pipeline relied heavily on manual processes and physical paperwork rather than digital workflows.

With the help of CLEVR and Mendix low code software, CED created an intuitive app for employees to input claims quickly. The company also developed an Automatic Damage Settlement Platform to digitize the claim-handling process.

The new system eliminated CED’s reliance on paper forms and reduced the time needed to settle claims by 50%.

In addition, CED has offered its Automatic Damage Settlement Platform as a software-as-a-service solution for insurance claims management. This represents a new line of business for CED, generating revenue that can be used to support further digitization efforts.

Mayo Clinic: Using the Cloud to Increase Clinician Capacity

The Mayo Clinic—a leading healthcare system with hundreds of hospitals, specialty healthcare facilities, and primary care clinics across the US—has faced rising healthcare demand and a shortage of qualified providers.

To address these challenges, the Mayo Clinic launched several digital transformation initiatives to enhance its capacity, improve patient outcomes, and ensure a high-quality employee experience.

In 2019, the Mayo Clinic partnered with Google Cloud to store medical data securely in the cloud. The move enabled providers across the system to access Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-protected patient records without delays. This helped simplify business processes and improve care coordination.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mayo Clinic turned to the cloud to host telehealth appointments, which allowed providers to see more patients and safeguarded patient and provider health. Between 2020 and 2022, the healthcare system increased telehealth appointments by 500%.

Cloud computing has also enabled the Mayo Clinic to run AI-powered analyses of medical data to assist in early diagnoses. For example, its AI tools evaluate electroencephalograms (EEGs) to detect Alzheimer’s disease early, when treatment is most effective.

These digital transformation efforts have solidified Mayo Clinic’s reputation as a leading hospital system in many states it serves.

Final Thoughts on Digital Transformation Examples

These digital transformation examples highlight the incredible potential of technologies like AI, low code, PLM, cloud computing, mobile apps, and augmented reality to transform business processes. They also demonstrate the far-reaching impact of digital transformations across diverse industries.

Want to learn more? Explore CLEVR’s customer success stories for additional examples of digital transformation strategies and discover how low code development can help your business thrive.

IFS Cloud is a robust Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform designed to manage essential business functions—from finance and inventory to manufacturing and supply chain operations. While it offers a strong foundation, making direct changes to it often does more harm than good. Manual customization risks breaking future upgrades and ends up increasing your IT team's backlog of requested features.

Fortunately, keeping pace with growth and adopting new technologies doesn’t require replacing your ERP or taking unnecessary risks. By extending your IFS system with Mendix low code development, you can quickly add a flexible layer on top, enhancing functionality without disrupting the stability of your core systems.

Short on Time? Here's a Brief Overview

• Preserve your investment: You can keep your stable IFS Cloud system for essential business operations while adding new capabilities.
• Speed up innovation: You can build new features in weeks instead of months with visual development tools.
• Reduce development costs: Create custom applications without expensive specialized programmers.
• Connect everyone: Give employees, customers, and suppliers intuitive access to your ERP data.
• Protect your upgrade path: You can add functionality without modifying your core ERP system.

The Innovation Bottleneck: Why ERP Alone Can't Keep Up

ERP systems are great for standardized processes like accounting, inventory management, and order processing, but this standardization makes rapid change difficult.

Customization problems

Organizations running IFS often find themselves weighing the benefits of new functionality against the risks and costs of customization. Customize your ERP directly, and you can face several practical problems:

• Direct code modifications often break during system upgrades.
• Each customization requires specialized developers who charge premium rates.
• The more you customize, the harder future changes become.
• Testing and quality assurance consume significant resources.

IT backlogs delay critical business capabilities

Your business constantly evolves, and technological requirements only get more complex. For instance, sales teams request mobile apps for field representatives, operations departments need enhanced reporting dashboards, and finance requires specialized approval workflows. Every request joins an ever-growing queue that your IT department must try to address even while maintaining existing systems.

When organizations lack effective ways to handle these needs, departments often create independent solutions, such as stand-alone spreadsheets, isolated databases, or unauthorized shadow systems. Such fragmentation creates inconsistent data, wastes time, duplicates efforts, and increases error rates throughout your organization.

What Is Mendix and How Does It Work Alongside IFS?

Mendix is a low code development platform—a visual environment where you build applications by dragging and dropping elements instead of writing thousands of lines of code. The platform transforms complex programming into visual design, making application development more accessible to a wider audience across your organization.

Let’s see how it would work in a real-word example. Creating a customer portal with Mendix would typically involve:

• Visually designing screens by dragging elements like tables and buttons.
• Connecting these screens to your data using point-and-click tools.
• Adding logic with visual flowcharts instead of complex programming.
• Testing and deploying with built-in tools that handle technical details automatically.

With IFS, Mendix works as an extension layer that connects through secure APIs (application programming interfaces—essentially code that lets systems share information). This allows your extensions to leverage IFS Cloud's Industrial AI features, bringing advanced analytics and intelligent automation into your business workflows.

The result? Create modular, composable applications that can be quickly adapted as needs change.

For example, you can maintain customer master data in IFS but use a Mendix application where sales representatives update contact information and view order history on their tablets. The information stays synchronized automatically, without duplicate data entry.

Use Cases: How Organizations Extend IFS With Mendix

Companies in manufacturing, retail, energy, and financial industries use Mendix to enhance their IFS systems in various ways without disrupting core stability.

1. Self-service portals

Many businesses need to give external partners access to ERP data. Mendix excels at creating intuitive portals for vendors, customers, and field personnel.

With Mendix portals connected to IFS, organizations can provide real-time access to relevant data while maintaining security controls. Suppliers can view purchase order statuses and delivery schedules, customers can track their orders and access invoicing information, and field personnel can access work assignments and update job progress—all without requiring direct ERP system access or consuming internal resources for routine inquiries.

2. Mobile workforce solutions

Field service management works better when mobile apps connect technicians with your ERP. Mendix applications let field teams access work orders, update job statuses, and record time—even offline.

VodafoneZiggo, a Dutch telecommunications provider, had technicians complaining about juggling multiple systems during service calls. Its new application integrates data from multiple systems into one unified mobile tool. With technicians saving an average of 10 minutes per truck roll, VodafoneZiggo has seen significant efficiency gains.

3. Process automation and workflow

IFS offers standard workflows, but companies often require custom approval sequences or specialized notifications. Mendix can handle these unique workflows while keeping transactions in the ERP.

CED, a European specialist in claims management within the insurance industry, transformed its entire claims process using Mendix. Previously, handling the approximately one million claims worth more than €2.5 billion annually involved extensive paper processes, manual work, and duplicated efforts. Working with CLEVR, CED developed a platform that handles all process flows related to a claim—from initial damage report to final payout. The new automated system reduced the time required for the entire claims handling process by 50%.

4. Legacy application replacement

Many IFS customers have older applications alongside their ERP. These aging systems often create problems due to outdated technology and high maintenance costs. Mendix applications can replace these systems while connecting smoothly with IFS. This digital transformation strategy focuses on step-by-step modernization rather than replacing everything at once.

Integration and Governance: IT Still in Control

For IT leaders worried about system sprawl and security risks, Mendix offers governance features that maintain central control while enabling broader development capabilities.

Security and access control

Mendix applications integrate with your existing security infrastructure through multiple layers of protection. For instance, single sign-on seamlessly connects with your identity providers, while row-level security and role-based permissions ensure that users access only the appropriate data. Additionally, comprehensive audit logging tracks all system activity for compliance and security monitoring purposes.

Deployment management

IT maintains control through a structured deployment pipeline with dedicated environments for development, testing, and production use. The platform offers one-click deployment between environments and provides full version control with rollback capabilities, eliminating the need for complex manual processes.

Enabling citizen development safely

Mendix's visual development tools enable business analysts to build applications within guardrails established by IT, utilizing pre-approved components, standardized templates, and secure integrations. Automated quality and security checks prevent common mistakes throughout the development process.

Why CLEVR? Your Partner in IFS + Mendix Excellence

At CLEVR, we bring specialized expertise in connecting Mendix with ERP systems, such as IFS. With nearly 300 professionals across 18 countries serving over 500 clients, we understand both the technical details and business considerations in these integrations.

What really sets us apart is the fact that we work closely with business and IT teams to identify opportunities for enhancing their IFS environment. Our experts design Mendix applications that connect securely with your IFS ERP while meeting your specific business requirements. Using agile methodologies, we build, test, and refine applications with regular feedback to ensure they deliver exactly what you need.

Extend, don't rebuild

The best enterprise systems today use a single platform that combines specialized tools working together, rather than one system that does everything poorly. The IFS and Mendix combination gives you:

• Speed: Build customer portals, mobile apps, and workflows in weeks instead of months.
• Right Fit: Create exactly what your business needs without compromising.
• Safety: Protect your core ERP investment and upgrade path.
• Flexibility: Adapt quickly as your business evolves without expensive rework.

Creating a "best of both worlds" scenario, your trusted IFS system handles core business transactions while Mendix provides the agility to address changing market needs quickly. You can build an interactive user experience that puts the right information at your staff's fingertips. And governance topics like security, compliance, and system management remain straightforward with clear processes and responsibilities.

Mendix and IFS can work together for your company. Contact CLEVR for a personalized demo of our integration capabilities.

Research Methodology

This article combines insights from customer case studies with technical information from IFS and Mendix platform documentation. All implementation details reflect actual capabilities verified through practical application in enterprise environments.

For decades, complexity has been the norm for the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry, and most organizations have learned to navigate it with ingenuity, rigor, and grit. But what’s changed most in recent years is the pace, making PLM for aerospace and defense and modern aerospace PLM software a strategic necessity, not just an engineering tool.

Programs have become more ambitious—not just in scale, but in complexity and integration. Today’s aircraft, spacecraft, and defense platforms are expected to be smarter, more autonomous, and more environmentally responsible, while meeting mission-critical standards for safety, security, and interoperability. Electrification, fly-by-wire systems, AI-enabled decision-making, and digital battle management are no longer emerging technologies—they are rapidly becoming program requirements.

Yet each innovation adds layers of data, interdependency, and verification that must be managed in parallel across multiple teams and tools that often lack proper integration, standardization, or context.

In practice, managing this complexity manually or through isolated systems leads to slow decision-making, rework, and certification or accreditation challenges that ripple through the entire lifecycle. While many A&D organizations have modernized select engineering capabilities (e.g. simulation tools, digital twins, system modeling), these efforts often remain disconnected from the broader product and program infrastructure.

What makes PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) essential isn’t just managing this complexity. It’s turning it into a competitive advantage. And with increasing pressure from regulators, defense ministries, customers, and program timelines, PLM is increasingly seen not just as an engineering tool, but as a core enabler for cross-functional agility, mission assurance, and integrated program delivery.

5 Reasons Why PLM Is Essential for Aerospace & Defense

Let's break down the reasons why PLM has shifted from a support tool to a strategic necessity:

1. Rising Product and System Complexity

Modern A&D platforms now handle integration across hundreds to thousands of system interfaces, spanning across mechanical, electrical, software and mission systems. These aren’t just technical challenges, they’re organizational and systemic as well.

Each domain typically uses its own specialized tools, standards, and processes, making it difficult to manage and validate system-wide changes, particularly when teams rely on manual updates and lack real-time visibility.

A robust aerospace PLM software allows aerospace and defense companies to centralize engineering data, enforce process consistency, and enable real-time collaboration across all domains. This ensures changes are validated early, integration points are understood, and downstream implications are fully visible.

2. Accelerated Development Cycles

It's no secret that building and certifying A&D products is inherently complex. These systems are safety-critical by design, require strict adherence to evolving global regulations (e.g. DO-178C, ARP4754A, ITAR, DFARS, NATO standards, etc.), and they must meet rigorous performance, durability, and operational standards—often across extreme environments.

In addition, certification is a year-long process of exhaustive documentation, iterative testing, and multi-stakeholder validation, whose cost and time investment, in many cases, can exceed the cost of design itself.

At the same time, according to Deloitte, sustained growth in commercial aviation is placing intense pressure on OEMs and suppliers to accelerate design, development, and certification cycles, often compressing timelines by 20–30%.

Modern defense PLM software brings all critical teams (design, simulation, manufacturing, and compliance) into a shared environment where they can collaborate in real time, using consistent, version-controlled data. This unified approach ensures traceability and transparency across the entire lifecycle, allowing aerospace companies to accelerate development without compromising on safety, compliance, or quality standards.

3. Sustainability Demands

Sustainability in A&D isn’t just about SDG compliance. It’s about managing growing expectations from regulators, investors, and OEM customers who demand transparency, verifiability, and measurable action. Lifecycle assessments (LCAs), material passports, and recyclability scores must be tied back to specific components, suppliers, and product versions, which presents a massive data challenge.

Additionally, directives like the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the broader European Green Deal are ramping up expectations for full lifecycle transparency and environmental accountability. For aerospace companies already navigating complex regulations (like REACH, RoHS, ISO 14001, NATO and dual-use compliance), this adds a new layer of pressure to integrate sustainability from the earliest stages of design and development.

PLM systems make this possible by integrating sustainability KPIs directly into product and process workflows. This allows A&D companies to track, quantify, and align engineering and sourcing decisions, supporting PLM for sustainability reporting in aerospace especially when regulatory requirements are evolving, while generating auditable, report-ready ESG data.

4. Digital Transformation Enablement

Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept. It’s actively reshaping how A&D companies design, test, and manage their products. When integrated with technologies like digital twins, robotics, and smart factory systems, AI can significantly accelerate aerospace development cycles, helping teams uncover insights faster, reduce costly physical prototyping, anticipate risks earlier, and drive intelligent design reuse across multi-domain systems.

However, for AI to deliver on its potential, it requires an environment where data is centralized, structured, and contextual.  This is precisely where PLM becomes indispensable.

With AI, modern PLM systems evolve from static systems of record into dynamic systems of intelligence, providing the structured and connected backbone required to train AI on governed engineering data. They enable the digital thread in aerospace and defense programs and support advanced practices like MBSE, enabling real-time insights for design optimization, sourcing decisions, and production flow simulations. In this way, data becomes trustworthy, accessible, and interoperable across every stage of the lifecycle.

5. Global Supply Chain Complexity

A&D companies depend on vast, multi-tier supplier ecosystems to deliver critical components, subsystems, and increasingly software-driven systems. In today’s environment, where post-pandemic disruptions persist and aircraft programs demand unprecedented levels of customization and integration, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to coordinate design and engineering changes across dispersed suppliers without introducing delays, inconsistencies, or compliance risks.

Add to this the pressures of geopolitical instability, shifting trade alliances, and export controls, and the cost of poor coordination quickly becomes unsustainable.

PLM systems serve as the foundation for PLM supply chain management in aerospace and defense programs, helping manufacturers regain control. They offer centralized, version-controlled platforms for collaboration that support structured approvals, real-time data traceability, and synchronized BOM updates—ensuring that supply chain orchestration scales as complexity grows.

PLM Is the Foundational Layer for Aerospace & Defense Innovation

What started as a "nice-to-have" system for managing engineering data is now becoming a strategic investment, essential for staying competitive in the aerospace industry. According to CIMdata, over 65% of A&D OEMs are actively implementing digital thread strategies, with PLM platforms like Siemens Teamcenter at the heart of these transformations.

Let’s look at some of those examples:

• ‍Bye Aerospace used Siemens Teamcenter and NX to streamline their design and certification process, achieving a 66% reduction in engineering resources required, while accelerating time to compliance. This demonstrates how a unified PLM system can eliminate redundant work and ensure seamless data continuity across the development lifecycle.‍
• Northrop Grumman leveraged Siemens Teamcenter to establish a digital thread across defense programs. By connecting virtual and physical testing workflows, they improved traceability, accelerated certification cycles, and reduced weight in critical subsystems. This shows how Siemens solutions support defense organizations with mission assurance, compliance, and agility in highly regulated environments.

Accelerate Product Development with CLEVR & Siemens Teamcenter in Aerospace & Defense

Siemens Teamcenter for aerospace and defense is one of the most robust and widely adopted PLM systems. As part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, it integrates seamlessly across engineering, manufacturing, and enterprise ecosystems—including ERP, MES, MBSE, and simulation environments. This enables A&D manufacturers to digitize and orchestrate every phase of product development, from concept through certification and into sustainment.

Teamcenter offers:

• Unified, multi-domain data and bill-of-materials (BOM) management
• Cloud-native deployment via Teamcenter X cloud PLM in aerospace and defense for scalability and faster time to value
• Built-in support for MBSE, sustainability metrics tracking, and digital twin enablement
• Secure, role-based collaboration across dispersed design and supplier networks
• Robust change and configuration management tailored to regulatory-intensive programs

At CLEVR, we have seen first-hand how A&D companies scale and future-proof their operations with Teamcenter. With over 30 years of experience implementing PLM in aerospace and defense, we help organizations navigate every stage of the transformation journey—from strategy and planning to system integration, data migration, and long-term support.

Our team specializes in guiding companies through the complexities of integrating Teamcenter into highly customized, multi-system landscapes, especially where legacy tools, compliance obligations, and distributed teams present unique challenges.

Whether you're optimizing traceability, enabling cross-domain collaboration, or unifying design and production workflows, CLEVR ensures that your PLM foundation is built with your needs in mind, embedding resilience, agility, and long-term growth into your operations.

Key Takeaway

The aerospace and defense industry are undergoing a period of rapid transformation, driven by technological disruption, rising regulatory demands, evolving sustainability targets, and increased pressure to bring smarter, more integrated products to market faster.

In this context, where traditional tools and siloed systems no longer meet the demands of modern aerospace programs, PLM for aerospace and defense has emerged as a critical backbone.

From accelerating development cycles and supporting AI adoption, to ensuring traceability across sustainability metrics and global supply chains, PLM enables organizations to manage complexity, drive innovation, and maintain compliance in one connected ecosystem.

At CLEVR, with decades of domain expertise, we help aerospace and defense companies unlock this potential, turning complexity into competitive advantage through smart PLM implementations tailored to their goals. By combining deep Siemens Teamcenter knowledge with agile development expertise, CLEVR helps organizations build secure PLM foundations while developing intuitive and compliant applications.

Whether you're starting your PLM journey or scaling an existing system, our team can advise on best practices, guide your system integration strategy, and support complex migrations, ensuring long-term success and faster ROI.

Get in touch to learn more or schedule a consultation.

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