At Autodesk University last month, Autodesk announced a new member of the Fusion family of cloud-based services: Fusion Production. Joining Fusion 360, Fusion Connect, Fusion Lifecycle and Fusion Team, Fusion Production is Autodesk’s cloud-based solution for smart manufacturing—also referred to as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Industry 4.0 and digital factory.
The promise of smart manufacturing starts with data. The idea is to gather as much information as possible throughout the production process, and then analyze it to prevent asset failure and find ways to improve the production process. However, this process can be spread out across an organizationally diverse supply chain, so the data might be spread out as well.
What Fusion Production brings to the table is a unified way to access disparate data in real time. As Autodesk’s Stephen Hooper puts it in his blog post announcing Fusion Production, “We can provide line-of-site across an extended supply network where products cross organizational boundaries … Thanks to Production and IIoT-enabled analytics, factory production managers are now able to harness the data gathered through production processes and make it visible in real-time across the supply chain.”
With a common data environment in the cloud, Fusion Production allows users in the supply chain to access and act upon data in real time, quickly respond to changes in production and adapt accordingly.
“What we’re really doing is connecting people, data and machines to improve productivity and enable a nimble response to demand,” Hooper wrote.
Although Fusion Production is not yet available—an update on that front is expected in early 2018—the cloud-based solution is seeing some positive feedback.
“We are constantly trying to find the most efficient and cost-effective way of doing business,” said Bryan Lagrange of Mezco Fabrication. “We like software that is quick, easy, reliable and affordable. Fusion Production, combined with Fusion 360, allows us to easily integrate CAD and CAM data to create the part with the processes, procedures and schedule of day-to-day operations of a job shop in one seamless flow.”
To learn more about Fusion Production, read the Autodesk blog post here. For more recent Autodesk Fusion news, check out AnyCAD Comes to Fusion 360.