Enabling equipment design for engineer to order and configure to order business models
Reduced time to market is critical across industries. Even more so when you have relatively low production volumes against engineering effort, heavy equipment OEMs typically get many customization requests and must offer multiple equipment design variants to address varying local regulations. Customization makes a common practice of time-sensitive approaches like engineer to order (ETO) and configure to order (CTO). To be successful with ETO and CTO, you need an equipment design process with easy access to the engineering BOM. Accessibly to the engineering BOM drives commonality and reuse. This enables efficient configuration, variation management, virtual verification, and validation of different equipment design variants using a digital mockup.
A collaborative design environment for complex equipment design
Growing equipment design complexity adds time pressure. Most of the new capabilities added today relate to emerging digital technologies and require strong interaction between mechanics, electronics, and software. For equipment design, that means more parameters, more physics, and more stakeholders in the equipment design process. Heavy equipment OEMs must find a way to manage all of this, as it might slow down their time to market. It’s important that they can limit the number of iterations required to finalize the design, particularly prototyping loops. To achieve this, they need a virtual multi-disciplinary design approach that drives mechanical design, electrical and electronic systems design, and software development simultaneously. This approach must consist of tools and workflows in which all equipment design stakeholders can collaborate on comprehensive multi-disciplinary models and common data.
Siemens comprehensive and open environment for reduced time to market
In Accelerated Equipment Design, we bundle all Siemens solutions that specifically address the challenges related to having many design variants and increased design complexity. Together, they form an utterly comprehensive set to help heavy equipment manufacturers achieve reduced time to market for any type of design. Our solutions enable our customers to speed up various parts of the design process on a standalone basis. But these solutions are even more powerful when they are integrated and used together, fostering collaboration between disciplines and teams. Still, at Siemens, we understand that at some point or for certain applications, our customers might prefer to use our solutions in conjunction with different tools, such as their in-house capabilities. Therefore, Siemens Software is configurable to allow tight integration with any homegrown or alternative software.
Easy-to-access solutions for all equipment design engineers
We extend that accessibility across the board. Our offering to increase efficiency is about process and tools and reducing the time, and effort engineers and analysts need to spend. Being Siemens, we know what it takes to convert ideas into products, and we are also users of our product design technologies. That experience helps us understand and address our customers’ pain points. For example, we know that for virtual verification and validation to reduce physical prototyping loops, you usually need specialized methods that have a steep learning curve and require expert knowledge. We have such tools in our offering. But at the same time, we make some tools accessible for occasional users. In this way, design teams can apply such tools without requiring the involvement of highly skilled experts for every single calculation. By doing so, numerous simulation activities can be frontloaded, resulting in additional reduced time to market.
Providing the flexibility to deploy equipment design solutions at the desired scale
Finally, we are lowering the bar to get started with our solutions, as most Accelerated Equipment Design components are accessible via the cloud. In this way, any company, from start-up to large enterprise, can have quick and cost-effective access to new technologies and efficiently scale their design capabilities to match the requirements of their specific product and market. Companies can choose how they want to work, either using on-premises software, or working via the cloud, or combining both methods. Our cloud-based solutions present some advantages, such as a lower entry price and risk, reduced investment cost for hardware and IT operations, organization-wide scalability and flexibility, easy deployment, and continuous access to the most recent versions.
