Business Day

Session Title

CLM at McLaren – Enabling Customization of Complex Products at Scale

Henry Ford offered customers any colour, as long as it was black. In 2026, McLaren offers its customers a vastly more diverse range of options, up to and including completely bespoke product commissions through the MSO Mclaren Special Operations division. How do luxury automotive manufacturers deliver this breadth of choice without enduring operational chaos?

This talk reveals how Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) can be used to transform complexity into a competitive advantage, enabling the management of highly complex automotive products and their customisation at scale, whilst maintaining brand integrity.

From Ford’s mass production to McLaren’s mass customisation: perfection isn’t accidental – it’s systematic.

About the Speaker

Tom Brimble

Tom Brimble is an automotive product leader and EV advocate, currently Head of Product Management at McLaren Automotive. He has built and led product, marketing, and configuration teams across emerging and established vehicle brands, with a strong focus on zero-emissions mobility. Alongside his corporate roles, he founded Green Plates ZEV and bee-EVs to accelerate electric vehicle adoption. He holds an MEng in Automotive Engineering from Loughborough University.

Session Title

Mastering Customization Complexity: CLM as the Data Foundation for AI-Driven Growth

Customization is no longer a differentiator – it is the baseline. Yet many companies still manage product knowledge across silos: spreadsheets, legacy systems, documents, and local “truths.” The result is predictable: version drift, inconsistent metadata, rework, and slow handovers from engineering to sales and operations.

In this keynote, Dr. Wilhelm ‘Wil’ Bielert, CDO & SVP at Premier Tech, offers a bird’s-eye view on why Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) has become a strategic capability. His central thesis: mastering customization complexity requires a seamless end-to-end IT architecture, and CLM is the backbone – governing the solution space as a shared source of truth and enabling integrations across PLM/CAD, CPQ/CRM, and downstream execution.

Looking ahead, Wil connects CLM to digital threads as the bridge from governed configuration knowledge to scalable automation. He highlights how data fidelity, traceability, and governance across configuration, product, and process threads enable advanced AI, including agent-based support in manufacturing and operations. Where modern 3D/visualization platforms are part of the stack, they can accelerate this journey turning customization complexity into faster change, higher consistency, and sustainable growth.

About the Speaker

Wilhelm Bielert

Wilhelm Bielert is CDO and senior VP of Premier Tech and is a recognized leader in digital transformation. He has held leadership roles in startups and global brands such as Viacom and Mercedes-Benz. He has also managed various technology-driven projects for industry giants like Universal Pictures, Disney and Deutsche Telekom. He published a book in 2024 on value creation with AI.

Session Title

From Customization to Resilience: Building an End-to-End Digital Thread with CLM

As industrial companies embrace mass customization, complexity has become structural. Products are increasingly configurable, software-driven, and globally sourced – yet product data and configuration logic remain fragmented across PLM, ERP, and service systems. What is missing is a continuous digital thread that connects configuration decisions across the lifecycle. While organizations can describe what could be built, many still lack a trusted, end-to-end view of what is actually inside a specific product instance.

This gap limits scalable growth and becomes critical when conditions change. Recent supply disruptions showed how quickly constrained parts or critical raw materials force manufacturers to answer a simple but urgent question: what can we still build and deliver? Without an end-to-end digital configuration thread, the result is manual analysis, conservative decisions, delays, and unnecessary cost.

In this session, Rüdiger Stern, Managing Director at Accenture Industry X, positions resilience and sovereignty as key outcomes of mastering customization complexity, where cost, supply continuity, sustainability, and access to critical raw material are increasingly interconnected. Rüdiger will highlight how a Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) approach creates a consistent digital thread across design, manufacturing, service, and return. This allows companies to make confident build decisions under constraints, increases transparency, and supports circular-economy models by showing exactly what is in each returned product – helping recover critical raw material and manage future costs.

About the Speaker

Rüdiger Stern

Rüdiger Stern is Managing Director of Industry X at Accenture DACH. He brings extensive experience from previous roles at AssetMinder, the Society of Cost Engineers, FACTON, and Accenture. He studied at Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin from 1994 to 1998 and holds a Diploma degree in Physics (Dipl.-Ing.) with a focus on product development, test, and validation.

Session Title

Fast, Reliable Configuration in an AI Era

AI is everywhere. In the headlines, in the boardroom, and increasingly on the factory floor.

But there’s a catch.

AI is only as powerful as the foundation beneath it.

In this keynote, Damantha Boteju, CPTO at Configit, explores what it takes to move from AI ambition to real AI impact. And the keyword is “Trust”. In manufacturing, reliability isn’t optional. Decisions affecting production lines, suppliers, or customer orders must be deterministic and traceable. There’s no room for guesswork. In order to do that manufacturers must solve a more fundamental challenge: trusted, connected, and governed data.

As AI becomes mainstream, user interfaces will commoditize. The real competitive edge will shift to robust data foundations, governed digital threads, and APIs designed for autonomous agents to act with confidence.

Agentic AI can unlock massive value. The mandate is clear: build the foundation that makes AI trustworthy, scalable, and ready for industrial reality.

About the Speaker

Damantha Boteju

Damantha Boteju is chief product and technology officer at Configit, which he joined in March 2023, bringing over 25 years of expertise in software development with a focus on enterprise-class products. As CPTO, he leads the product and technology strategy, driving innovation, and delivering solutions that meet the complex needs of Configit’s global customers.

Session Title

One Configuration Truth – CNH’s CLM approach for Scalable Customization and Servitization

CNH is a global leader in equipment, technology, and services across Agriculture, Construction, and Financial Services. As complexity increased, CNH faced fragmented sales tools, manual configuration, inconsistent experiences, and rising dealer frustration across organizational siloes.

CNH began its Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) journey in 2012 with the CNH eQuipment configurator, expanding into offline sales, dealer pricing, and mobile applications. Over time, CLM evolved into a strategic backbone, standardizing configuration and pricing globally and delivering measurable value across departments.

Today, CNH is extending CLM beyond products into services. With a dedicated Services Configurator and structured authoring based on Configit Ace, integrated with CRM (Microsoft Dynamics) and ERP (SAP), CNH has established a shared source of truth across B2B and B2C channels – delivering value today while laying the foundation for a connected digital thread and future, AI-enabled use cases.

In this session, Alberto Russo, IT Project Manager at CNH, shows how CLM enables faster, error-free configuration, improves data quality, and drives dealer excellence and scalable servitization.

About the Speaker

Alberto Russo

Alberto Russo is an IT Project Manager at CNH, specializing in product definition and configuration. Alberto began his career in 2004 as a consultant and programmer supporting Iveco (then Fiat Industrial), where he worked for six years before joining CNH’s SAP implementation as a senior programmer. Since 2012, he has focused primarily on project management, leading initiatives at the intersection of IT, product configuration, and enterprise systems.

About the Speaker

Peter à Porta

Peter à Porta is Product Owner for Configuration Management Systems at Vestas, where he focuses on improving how products, data, and decisions flow across the organization. He has extensive experience leading complex change initiatives across production and product development, with expertise in areas such as engineering change management, PLM, product configuration, and master data management. Known for his practical and collaborative approach, Peter helps organizations reduce complexity and implement sustainable solutions to challenging business problems.