It’s time for the industrial System of Engagement
Despite having more systems and data than ever, today’s manufacturers struggle to collaborate around their product digital threads. Their inability to get the most out of the data spread across their IT infrastructure is a critical business issue. Improved collaboration is a significant opportunity for improvement as our research finds that 43% of larger companies report poor collaboration as one of the issues that slows engineers down the most, resulting in missed deadlines, higher costs, reduced innovation, and poor quality.
It’s time for manufacturers to change how they connect and collaborate across the systems that house their product data. Our recent white paper, The Business Value of An Industrial System of Engagement Platform, introduced the concept of the Industrial System of Engagement (SOE) platform to extend the value of current enterprise systems by providing enhanced connectivity and collaboration.
The paper leverages our research and insights from two thought leaders, Style Crest Project Engineer Tyler Lucas and Paragon Medical Devices Senior Quality Manager Jeff Livingston, to lay out the value available from the Industrial SOE and describe the capabilities it must deliver.
This guest post shares an overview of the Industrial SOE concept and discusses how Nexus by Hexagon delivers collaboration value for manufacturers. For more information on the Industrial SOE, you can also download the full white paper.
Callout quote from the paper: “To succeed in the long term, industrial companies must adopt a more connected, data-driven business approach that allows them to collaborate around a cohesive digital thread of product design, manufacturing, and quality information.”
The elements of an industrial System of Engagement
The Industrial System of Engagement (SOE) is a platform that complements and connects digital thread data from existing data sources and systems of record to allow secure, contextual, data-centric collaboration, workflows, and purpose-built applications supporting efficient, agile, modern, flexible user experiences. It enables manufacturers to connect disparate data and allows the right people to collaborate in a timely way to create business value from industrial data. The platform’s digital thread data model also sets the stage for machine learning to drive significant value from Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The main tenants that the Industrial SOE supports include:
- Data centricity – creating the context for broader interoperability and collaboration by creating a comprehensive digital thread data model that spans systems.
- Integrated information – connecting digital thread data from existing data sources and systems of record to allow secure, contextual, data-centric collaboration, workflows, and purpose-built applications supporting efficient, agile, modern, flexible user experiences
- Operationalised collaboration – enabling secure, contextual, authoritative, timely intellectual properly sharing that is easily consumable by engineers and non-engineers alike
- A system for action – go beyond storing, showing, reporting, and sharing data by creating a platform for connected workers to utilise purpose-built applications and autonomous processes to act on the information in context
In further detail, the paper concludes that an effective industrial system of engagement should support:
- Data-centricity
- Digital thread modeling and relationship management
- Integration with underlying systems
- Bidirectional communication
- Purpose-built apps
- Modern, flexible user experiences
- Collaboration in an industrial context
Tech-Clarity Industrial System of Engagement framework
The Nexus platform as the industrial System of Engagement
Nexus is Hexagon’s open digital industrial platform for manufacturers built on the Microsoft Azure platform. Hexagon’s domain manufacturing industry expertise, data model, and applications coupled with Microsoft’s cloud and AI technologies, result in a platform that delivers the critical capabilities required to serve as an Industrial SOE.
Hexagon already delivers a broad solution portfolio that supports the digital thread across design & engineering, production, and metrology & inspection. With Nexus, Hexagon brings enhanced connectivity and collaboration across the product development lifecycle. Nexus has already delivered a number of use cases, including collaborative capabilities like a 3D whiteboard that enables faster, better decisions by supporting dynamic visual collaboration with 3D data on a web browser or on Microsoft Teams. Further, Microsoft brings significant AI capabilities to leverage the digital thread data in Nexus to support Nexus applications and hyperscale computing resources to dramatically improve the speed of engineering simulation, known as Nexus Compute. Leveraging AI and the cloud, they have delivered valuable solutions, including AI assistants and AI-powered automation such as ProPlan AI, which uses AI to reduce CAM programming time for machine tools and CoPilot technologies that drive increased productivity of CAM software.
Nexus digital reality platform
Nexus provides an opportunity for significant Industrial SOE value for the manufacturing industries. The platform allows Hexagon, their manufacturing customers, and third parties to leverage the foundation to drive greater business value as more applications are developed and delivered.
For more information on Nexus, please visit nexus.hexagon.com
