Siemens Digital Industries Software has submitted this post.
Written by: Rahul Garg, Vice President of Industrial Machinery, Siemens Digital Industries Software
Emerging geopolitical issues, remote working, simplification of IT infrastructure and technological trends are prompting machine builders to digitally transform their day-to-day practices. As a result, machine manufacturers are building smarter machines to cope with global competition, challenging supply chains, shrinking margins and growing energy, environmental and government regulatory requirements. At the same time, changing consumer preferences are driving product manufacturers’ need for highly agile, flexible machines to create a variety of products.
In response, machine builders must engineer machines that increasingly integrate hardware, software and services within one collaborative environment. Through these integrated tools, machine builders can incorporate greater automation and integrated quality into their products—driving greater efficiency into their processes while helping to competitively differentiate themselves from other market players. But, of course, that requires smarter software solutions to support machine design and manufacturing.
Advanced Machine Engineering is emerging as a digitally enabled approach to drive greater certainty in creating next-generation machines. It delivers a cloud-based, digital thread approach that empowers companies to develop increasingly complex machines faster, lowering development costs and leads to decreased production and operational costs.
Advanced machine engineering marries the development of the digital twin with the collaboration of mechanical, electrical, electronics and software engineering disciplines into a single source of truth—helping to break down engineering silos and streamline the communication vital to designing advanced machines. As a result, companies can better manage their projects to harness complexity to deliver profitable machines and transform it into a key competitive advantage.
Cloud-Optimized Project Management
The cloud is a critical factor in realizing the full potential of advanced machine engineering, helping teams build smarter machines faster. First and foremost, the cloud empowers collaboration, helping to align multiple engineering disciplines. Cloud-based solutions allow the mechanical, electrical, automation and software disciplines to amalgamate under one integrated space. The cloud is easily accessible to all and provides visibility into each discipline’s work stream, maximizes data re-use, supports an integrated change process and can ensure a standard delivery process while quickly adapting to evolving best practices.
With cloud-based collaboration, both physical and remote employees work together under one integrated platform. By aligning remote and physical workers in the cloud, engineering teams can store, access and utilize real-time dashboards, schedules and documents at any time, from anywhere. This drives efficiency into machine development processes, improving productivity.
Organizations gain an extra layer of transparency into projects’ progress while simultaneously gaining deeper traceability. Project data is readily found, shared and scaled across the organization, leading to greater remote collaboration. Machine builders concurrently capture and incorporate design feedback from numerous internal and external stakeholders, helping them create the most effective machines possible while avoiding delays or high costs. By incorporating feedback earlier into the design process, machine builders can also account for supply chain issues and source materials from other vendors as needed.
Repetitive tasks, such as filling out chart information, are easily automated through digital scheduling tools, reducing the need for administrative overhead while providing more time back to engineers to devote their resources to important projects. With each discipline aligning on customer requirements, industry standards, global regulations and energy expectations, among a myriad of other factors, machines can be produced in balanced harmony.
Connected Engineering in the Cloud
More than a 3D model, the digital twin provides a multi-disciplinary model of a machine, bringing together your mechanical, electrical and automation engineers to evaluate performance, energy use, output and other key indicators, enabling multiple disciplines to all work together. This analysis is enhanced through closed-loop testing, ensuring the most flexible and optimized machine is produced. It enables you to take control of all engineering data from all disciplines in one change process
The full benefits of the digital twin are only realized through cloud-based technology. Cloud-based technology allows all the engineering disciplines to merge online and offline; their combined input and data are the basis of the digital twin.
Digital Twin in the Cloud
When customer requirements change, machine builders need an easily accessible process for updating machine programming logic or refreshing machine models. It is also desirable to trace design iterations and understand why specific decisions must be made. The digital twin of machinery stored in the cloud makes this possible by offering a virtual mockup of a machine, where the latest up-to-date machine data is readily available. This digital twin is a crucial component of achieving advanced machine engineering.
The cloud-based digital twin helps machine builders create and simulate complex machine models. Models that test thousands of features against thousands of requirements, all helping produce the most optimized, innovative machine on the market.
Creating Tomorrow’s Advanced Machines
It is an intimidating mission to design, validate and manage modern-day manufacturing and assembly machines to achieve first-class quality while optimizing cost. Advanced machine engineering relies on a cloud-based approach for marrying the development of the digital twin with the collaboration of the many disciplines needed to develop the machine into a complete solution suite. This approach combines cloud-enabled project management with information from mechanical, electrical, electronics and software disciplines into a single source of truth—helping to break down engineering silos and streamline communication vital to designing the perfect machine.
Companies now have an effective approach to better manage their projects to harness complexity and transform it into a key competitive advantage.
Learn more about advanced machine engineering at Siemens.
About the Author:
Rahul Garg is the Vice President for Industrial Machinery & SMB Program at Siemens, responsible for defining and delivering key strategic initiatives and solutions, and global business development. He and his team are responsible for identifying key initiatives and developing solutions for the industry while working closely with industry-leading customers and providing thought leadership on new and emerging issues faced by the machinery industry. Rahul’s experience and insight are derived from 25-year career delivering software-based solutions for product engineering and manufacturing innovation for the global manufacturing industry, spanning a career in R&D to program management, sales and P&L management and having focused exclusively on the industrial machinery and heavy equipment industry since 2007.