Often when we discuss the fantastic possibilities of PLM and automation systems to build up efficient product realization apparatuses, it is from the perspective of starting from a greenfield site.

“But the reality is significantly more complex,” claims Kent Viitanen, COO at the ball bearing manufacturer SKF, during Siemens Digital Industries' recent Nordic Digital Transformation Summit in Stockholm.

“Our main task is to efficiently keep things rotating with reliable and high-quality ball bearings in sizes from 5 mm to 10 meters. We design them and manufacture from one to millions of ball bearings within this scope,” says Viitanen. “Globally, we have approximately 600 different production lines for the manufacture of these products, and close to 100 factories and service centers that can keep track of the functionality of the ball bearings out with the customers. There is a lot of money invested in this. This means that when technology and the world change and when new innovations are to be integrated, we cannot start from a blank sheet. We have to start from what we have, and step by step take it forward where we create an optimal balance between brownfields (the existing production apparatus) and greenfields (new technologies).

This perspective is undeniably interesting and pinpoints the balance between the introduction of new technologies and when, how and where to move on and break away from established, well-functioning product realization patterns. Taken to its extreme, this is about conservatism versus radicalism, paired with a good pinch of economism. There are few places in the global engineering industry where the effects and challenges of the encounter between the possibilities of the new digital world and the boundaries of the physical world are seen as clearly as at the ball bearing manufacturer SKF.

SKF’s COO, Kent Viitanen. (Image courtesy of SKF).

“First and foremost, we have the ‘World Class Manufacturing’ concept. But of course, we also have a number of other ongoing deals and business relationships. The core of our needs is to ensure that we can provide data structures that support our customers with all the facts needed for correct and effective decision making,” says SKF’s COO, Kent Viitanen in today’s article.

Kent Viitanen was clear about how the company is at a turning point. Not for the digital technology itself, but for the important question of how SKF needs to change organizationally to establish cohesive digital end-to-end solutions. “The future is about how we deal with this,” he said.

In large OEM organizations, you find yourself existing in both a physical and a digital reality. It is often about complex machines, organizations and systems that you should not blindly jump into and start making changes. A number of factors must be considered, and the people in the production process are some of the most important.

How to get these people onto the train to the future is the starting point that Viitanen believes determines how fast and how successful the digitization journey will be.

So, what does the digital lineup look like? In this article, I will clarify the current context of this digitization journey at SKF, and then discuss how they did it and what the road ahead looks like within a follow up article.

PTC on the Product Development Side, Siemens in Manufacturing

Centrally within product development and design, SKF works in PTC's solutions. SKF has hundreds of seats of the CAD software Creo for the design pieces, and thousands of licenses of PTC's cPDm software Windchill to keep track of data, store it and collaborate around it during the development work. In addition to this, SKF uses software from other PLM developers as well as SKF’s own proprietary, domain-specific solutions within areas such as simulation and analysis.

SKF uses PTC Windchill to create the eBOM (engineering Bill of Materials), which essentially shows how a product is designed.

SKF works with CAD and PDM solutions from PTC in product development, while Siemens Teamcenter is the backbone in manufacturing. (Image courtesy of SKF.)

When it comes to the manufacturing side, SKF uses solutions from Siemens Digital Industries Software, all within the framework of what it calls the “World Class Manufacturing” concept.

The eBOM discussed above forms the basis for the mBOM (manufacturing Bill of Materials) created after the handover to production in the factory, and which is used as the basis for manufacturing.

The manufacturing BOMs are created from the eBOMs, but now this is done in the Siemens cPDm software Teamcenter, which compiles all the necessary information.

The manufacturing BOMs contain things such as a Bill of Process (BOP). A product-related BOP contains components, subassemblies and the "recipe" for operations and resources needed to build the product. This is because a plant BOP consists of stations, cells and the list of operations that can be performed at a particular station. This capability bridges the disconnect between the product-centric starting point of building a product—the product BOP—and the facility-centric starting point of building a product—the factory BOP—while maintaining the vital link to the manufacturing BOM, under audit control, throughout the manufacturing planning process.

Digital Solutions Cannot Replace, But Can Make Smarter

That being said about the main digital arsenal, at the bottom line the basic elements of manufacturing will be the same, regardless of how the digital reality changes.

“Yes, that's how it is,” says Kent Viitanen. “The final product will require us to continue to buy steel, machine it, turn it, grind it, heat treat it, create a surface finish and finally assemble the parts into various ball bearing solutions. The digital system will not replace these elements. However, the digital will help us work smarter, but above all faster. Solutions for this exist in the PLM and automation world, but the question is: How do we make this fly? How do we make the connections with real physical manufacturing to the digital world?”

To accomplish this, speed in the manufacturing process is of utmost importance, says Viitanen.

“In fact, it is the single most important part and moreover it is what manufacturing in the future will be about. The industry will change, and it will go in the direction of connectivity, automation, AI, machine learning and others and the winners will be those who succeed in implementing this with the highest speed and certainly maintained or even better quality. In this, of course, PLM and automation technology is important, but even more important are the people. And not just one category of person, but everyone who is out there on the shop floor working together. It is here that one of the biggest challenges lies for anyone working with existing factory facilities in brownfield environments.”

SKF's Gothenburg, Sweden, factory. (Image courtesy of SKF.)

For example, SKF's Gothenburg, Sweden, factory is considered to be a modern model site that the company regards as an inspiring example for other SKF facilities around the world. Here, the company manufactures spherical roller bearings (SRB). The environment is fully automated with Laser Guided Vehicles (LGVs), KUKA robots and otherwise digitally connected production at a high level. The ball bearings produced here are a result of the dubbed World Class Manufacturing project, which is about a completely new way of thinking about and carrying out production, maintenance, creating flexibility and service around spherical ball bearings in dimensions of 180 to 360 millimeters.

Three State-of-the-Art Facilities

The overall picture of SKF's nearly one hundred facilities around the world includes three technologically super-advanced factories—in Gothenburg, Italy and Germany—where they have introduced the World Class Manufacturing concept and a range of AI-based, highly automated production devices using Siemens Digital Industries Closed-Loop Manufacturing as a central pillar. These are regarded as model facilities, and the plan for the future is that these pilot schemes will be implemented globally in all the company's facilities.

To the extent that there is a "secret" in this context, it is to shorten the changeover times between different batches of ball bearings. In some extreme cases, this may mean that weeks’ worth of re-setting processes should become hours. What are Viitanen’s thoughts on this?

“First of all, we should not digitize the old technology. Instead, we must hunt for new solutions that are smart at the same time as they are simple,” says Viitanen.

He describes the latter in particular as being the key. “Simplicity does not mean that things become incapable; instead, it means that the complexity and capabilities lie beneath the surface. The simplicity exists in the handling. This can be achieved with the help of things like smart AI technologies, machine learning and others.”

But before this can happen, you have to clean up the processes.

“I often hear people in the organization say, ‘Now we can handle complexity.’ My view is that this is the wrong approach. Instead, one should say, ‘Now we have created simplicity to handle things.’ That's what you should be chasing,” says Viitanen.

SKF’s Italian Airasca factory. (Image courtesy of SKF.)

In 2021, SKF invested heavily in its Italian Airasca factory. “This investment will make our customer offering in super precision bearings one of the strongest on the market. Through automated manufacturing and quality control processes, we will improve both the flexibility of our offering and the performance of our products,” says Kent Viitanen.

Technology is Key to the Target of Doubled Revenues by 2030

By scaling up these technology systems globally, the plan from SKF's new management under CEO Rickard Gustafson is to double the company's revenue by 2030.

Tough targets. SKF’s relatively new CEO, Rickard Gustafson, plans to double the company’s revenues by 2030. New technologies play a significant role in this strategy. (Image courtesy of SKF).

It is clear that new technology is of enormous importance in these plans. For example, among SKF's 600 production lines there are older solutions where it can take weeks to switch production from one type of ball bearing to another.

What the company sought with the three pilot plants is to create lightning-fast flexibility, with hours instead of weeks to change production lines between different batches. It is a given that if this can be implemented, it has enormous potential to sharpen production efficiency, time to market and also be able to produce significantly larger volumes overall.

SKF is not there yet, but automatic re-setting solutions are in the pipeline. I will discuss that future and how this digital transformation was done in the next article.