Speaker

Rüdiger Stern, Managing Director, Accenture

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.

Outcomes at a glance:

• Master complexity to scale customization
• Create transparency with a digital thread
• Make configuration a strategic capability