Making use of a factory digital twin to identify opportunities for improvement

Earlier this year, PTC announced that it was expanding its relationship with aPriori to support manufacturers' environmental sustainability goals in product dematerialization and manufacturing efficiency. PTC and aPriori will pursue greater interoperability between Windchill and aPriori's aP Pro, aP Design, and aP Generate software. Together, these solutions enable designers to review designs in CAD and PLM and generate reports for part costs, manufacturability, and environmental footprint. In this PTC Talk, guest speaker Philippe Adam, Chief Marketing Officer at aPriori, discusses moving from the era of uncertainty and inflation to transformation by utilizing the factory digital twin.

aPriori's mission is to empower manufacturers to rapidly unlock and identify new opportunities for innovation, growth, cost savings, and sustainability. To boost manufacturers' digital thread investment to deliver business value at scale and increase agility while at the same time minimizing risk.

Manufacturers face a few specific challenges that occur concurrently in the form of inflation and margin pressure, supply chain risk, labor and skills gap, and sustainability.

How can a factory digital twin improve a product's profitability?

Inflation and margin pressure are still part of the significant topic. A recent study from McKinsey highlights that inflation remains the top priority and subject for CEOs in manufacturing companies. The second one is geopolitical instability. This forces companies to focus on product cost and profitability and ensure it is optimized.

Supply chain risks still exist. It was a significant topic during COVID-19 but still exists in most companies due to the ongoing geopolitical instabilities. When we talk about supply chain risk, it is about ensuring that customers can manufacture all the parts needed to deliver the product and generate revenue when they receive an order.

Closing the labor and skills gap is something that manufacturers have been grappling with for some time, and it is growing as a challenge. It is challenging today for manufacturing companies to recruit new skills, and they must be guided through this process.

Finally, there is a growing need for sustainability. Everybody is trying to reduce the carbon footprint of their product, not just through the production process but when the customer uses it. The complexity of the four challenges together makes them difficult to solve. These challenges are not new; many companies have developed technology and solutions to address those problems. Most companies utilize technology to design products digitally with the notion of a digital twin.

Why is a product digital twin not enough?

They are starting to model reality into digital models so that they can run through what-if scenarios to understand how to address one or many of those different topics. You must be able to exchange information between all the employees and stakeholders within the company to ensure that everybody shares the same information to make the right decision at the right time.

Design engineers design with the CAD tool, driving characteristics and product details around what they design, and that is usually done with a digital twin. This is simply a replica of the final product that will be manufactured. Focusing solely on the digital product with the twin is insufficient because it does not incorporate the manufacturability. Factors such as how long does it take to manufacture or the cost of manufacturing? How many steps are required to manufacture the product? Can we do it differently? What type of factory is needed to impact the product's carbon footprint?

This is where aPriori comes into play by using the digital information at the product level. They complement what exists already and generate manufacturing insights that help companies unlock hitherto hidden parameters that they didn't even think they could open. The digital model can help companies plan for new ways of doing things they had never considered because they are constantly working on historical data instead of applying models to CAD objects.

This new information allows them to look at different materials, minimize the number of processes in the manufacturing process, and optimize the supply chain. It will enable companies to take a 360-degree view of the product. Not just the product itself but all the other parameters around the product. - the cost of the carbon footprint, the manufacturability, time to market, water, and electricity consumption are just a few.

How can manufacturers use a factory digital twin to overcome critical challenges?

But to help companies, this information must help overcome the four main challenges that manufacturers face that were outlined earlier. The first thing that aPriori addresses with a new client is any additional ways to optimize the cost of a product, and that is where they have gained their reputation in the market.

The digital models help companies to understand if they can manufacture a product more efficiently to minimize costs. aPriori works with the procurement team in the company on a cost breakdown and cost optimization to ensure that suppliers and manufacturers are in the correct country.

From an engineering perspective, they work with engineering teams in real-time to help them understand if the design they are proposing is well aligned with a cost, carbon footprint, or even a manufacturability target.

To learn more about how the partnership between PTC and aPriori can help develop factory digital twins to optimize performance, watch the full Talk here.