Lifecycle Insights

📈 Our research shows that companies have invested in several key areas of manufacturing sustainability initiatives, from wastewater recycling and sourcing cleaner fuels to reducing energy usage. A lot goes into large-scale #manufacturing initiatives like these. 🗜 But there's relentless pressure on companies to show continued #sustainability improvements. CEOs turn to their sustainability chiefs for ongoing gains. Many have checked boxes in manufacturing and are now turning their eye toward product engineering. Designing sustainable products? That's not on the list of straightforward initiatives, partly because multiple design process variables merge with ongoing #engineering challenges. It's like combining the ongoing traffic problems of L.A., Austin, or Atlanta with a flock of flamingos loose on the freeway after a trailer overturns. Getting where you're trying to go wasn't easy, and now there are flamingos. To appreciate what some solutions provide, here are some challenges engineers face: 🔩 Design process variables: if a product component isn't designed by engineers and they're tasked with integrating "off the shelf" components into a design, it's often challenging to access carbon footprint or efficiency data for that component. 👷♂️ Workforce and production crunches: engineers already navigate tight schedules. Understanding a product's sustainability profile doesn't relieve any schedule pressure: what's on the critical path is often the only thing engineers get to do. Integrating product sustainability must be quick, intuitive, or automated to meet deadlines. 🐢 Steady, reliable [late adopters]: You want engineers who are careful, thorough, and consistent. The flip side? Great engineers can be slow to let go of their established methods, habits, or even user interfaces. Compartmentalizing sometimes lets engineers tune out hassles they don't have the authority to fix or have gone unaddressed. 👍 The good news is that many solutions and tools are emerging to help engineers gauge the sustainability profile of their products. Bill of material (#BOM) tools: These can be consulted, such as a catalog, providing a grade or rating for a product or component. #Informedengineering tools provide integrated, dynamic information for engineers comparing sustainability metrics as they swap out one design component for an alternative component to measure sustainability impact. Are you exploring how to integrate sustainability gains into the design process? What challenges or benefits are you discovering along the way? How are you herding flamingos? I'd love to hear your story and what you've learned. #sustainabilityexecutive #manufacturing Follow Lifecycle Insights for #research and guidance on #digitaltransformation for #engineering and #manufacturing #executives. We'll be sharing more insights like this one from our interviews, studies, and publications. Stay tuned!

Recently, we released another compact, informative eBook: Next-Generation Machine Design: How Virtual Installation and Commissioning Minimize Downtime for F&B Producers. We worked to clarify some of the biggest challenges facing production machinery builders - and the food and beverage industry they serve. Have you ever tried to carry furniture or an appliance into a house, only to find the doorways are too narrow or the turns are too tight for it to fit easily? The dimensions might work just fine for the destination space, but the steps, turns, and doorjambs of the surrounding environment may obstruct or delay the process. Now, picture this problem at the scale of a food and beverage producer with a plant site that already houses large, heavy, complex machinery. If machine designers deliver equipment that's been planned and tested without reference to the surrounding environment, it's significantly more disruptive than a refrigerator that won't fit through a doorway: production stays halted while problems are addressed, delivery schedules are interrupted, customers are irked, and profit margins tumble. Food and beverage producers have to plan their schedules carefully when it's time to install and commission new machinery. Ideally, machine builders can support these schedules with efficient installation, but that doesn't always happen. What you need the next time you buy an oversized couch or new refrigerator is a program that lets you navigate a virtual blueprint of your house with dimensions and angles integrated to the millimeter. This way, you could enter the dimensions of a potential new purchase and ensure the path to the couch or refrigerator's destination will accommodate its journey. This is similar to what effective virtual installation and commissioning provides: machine design simulations that incorporate a specific production environment. Machine builders can prevent disruption by including the production environment early in the design process. That way, when it's time for physical installation, builders have already considered the machine's destination context and integrated any necessary adaptations. Virtual installation and commissioning solutions enable customization of automation systems, simulation of complicated scenarios, and virtual testing in simulated environments. Machine builders can identify potential problems long before physical installation, which eases pressure on food and beverage producers by supporting efficient physical installation and minimizing production disruption. To learn more about Virtual Installation and Commissioning, browse our latest eBook at the link below—many thanks to Siemens Digital Industries Software for supporting this publication. Follow Lifecycle Insights for #research and guidance on #digitaltransformation for #engineering and #manufacturing #executives. We'll be sharing more insights like this one from our interviews, studies, and publications. Stay tuned!

Curious to hear how Dassault Systèmes plans to integrate #AI into the platform? Interested to hear how Siemens Xcelerator solutions apply to the process goods sector? Want to hear about simulation-driven design from an analyst manager at a major manufacturer? Dive into the June edition of our newsletter, Our Take.

Have you checked out our popular eBooks? They're just one way we help accelerate engineering transformation initiatives. That’s why we researched and released Perfecting Battery Development and Integration: How to Overcome Engineering Challenges and Accelerate EV Battery Innovation. This resource delves into the complex challenges facing battery manufacturers. By clarifying the challenges and identifying linchpins, we help EV manufacturers recharge their approach - because the traditional approach is all out of juice. Why is this? For one thing, a lot hinges on battery design in the EV space. To accelerate EV adoption and sustainability benchmarks, manufacturers have to find ways to leverage battery design. But while EV battery development may still feel novel or next-gen to the public, designers have been trying to power innovation with out-of-date, inefficient, or one-size-fits-none tools. Compartmentalized solutions or general office solutions undermine efficient collaboration. Suppose your battery pack system design team uses one set of tools while the integration team uses another. It's tough to sync changes or communicate up-to-date product data in that case. Meanwhile, many teams attempt to collaborate by using general-purpose office solutions like spreadsheets, shared documents, or even email to communicate critical design alterations. Delays, testing costs, and redesign contribute to inefficiency runaway. Data quickly becomes outdated or lost, parts procurement works off old information and buys the wrong item or quantity, and innovation shrinks into simply trying to incur less waste. Take battery safety and thermal management. It's a great microcosm of the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Engineers prioritize design choices that maximize battery safety. They can't do this in a vacuum, though. Battery pack design is part of the overall vehicle and has to be analyzed in relation to the EV's other systems, too. How is weight distributed? How is temperature managed? Excessive heat reduces battery power, efficiency, and performance. EV manufacturers can prioritize safety mechanisms like advanced cooling systems, protective circuits, and temperature sensors - yet at the design stage, they often still lack basic collaboration mechanisms. Thankfully, there are advanced tools that EV companies can leverage so that designers can spend their energy catalyzing innovation instead of trying to mitigate the constant drain of inefficiency. To explore the benefits of simulation solutions and model-based design, check out our eBook at the link below. https://lnkd.in/gxPqJJQE Follow Lifecycle Insights for #research and guidance on #digitaltransformation for #engineering and #manufacturing #executives. We'll be sharing more insights like this one from our interviews, studies, and publications. Stay tuned! #batterysafety #thermalmanagement

"Today, up to 80% of the process time is wasted looking for the relevant product information." Catch up here with analyst Emma Feldman’s take on this statement from Siemens’ Axel Lorenz, and how to increase efficiency in process automation sites.

The next edition of our newsletter, Our Take, is out! Read it to learn more about our eBook for food and beverage machine makers, Emma's take on Siemens PLM Software' Mendix, Arvind's perspective on #GenAI in manufacturing, and Chad's take on the #ROI of #AI. Oh, and we're looking for experts in warehouse automation to join our Industry Expert Program. Apply within!

Know a warehouse automation expert? We'd love to talk with them!

Food and beverage (F&B) producers face immense market pressure to meet production deadlines. Any delays and downtime can lead to substantial losses. Machine builders can significantly reduce the risk of production disruptions during on-site installation and commission by using virtual simulation to minimize or eliminate unexpected challenges. Read our latest eBook to learn how virtual installation and commission simulation will help you seamlessly deploy new equipment to your F&B customers while ensuring operational continuity.

Managing a single, accurate bill of materials (BOM) is like running air traffic control—if air traffic expanded to include all air, road, and water traffic in your zip code. It's not a process that's easy to manage with a spreadsheet. That's why we delved into the challenges of BOM management in our recent eBook, How Do I Create and Manage an Accurate BOM? Simplifying BOM Management with Cloud-Based SaaS Solutions. We shared some of the most frustrating BOM challenges that commonly come up in our research - and features of cohesive solutions. This quick read will clarify your pain points and recharge your approach to solutions. Why are BOMs so complex? Products like machinery and heavy equipment are more complicated, with mechanical parts, integrated software, and electrical/electronic components. BOMs include data from various design programs and databases, from MCAD to supplier data on specific parts. After engineers create a BOM, key departments use it to make many decisions, from manufacturing processes to parts procurement. Meanwhile, every time the model changes, that change has to be communicated to relevant stakeholders. How has that been done traditionally? By hand, through emails or spreadsheets, which takes a complex process, slows it down further, and introduces the possibility of hard-to-track errors. Think about it like this: picture an air traffic controller emailing a pilot with updated landing information—or opening a spreadsheet to enter a flight path change, then emailing a colleague to let them know the updated information is now viewable in a spreadsheet. To put it mildly, this wouldn't be an optimal way to track changes and synchronize air traffic data. For manufacturers, every time a CAD model changes, the BOM needs to be updated—and that update needs to be shared across the board in real-time. That way, everyone works from a single source of truth, like air traffic controllers consulting a radar display showing current air traffic positions. So, what does that look like in the manufacturing sector? Our research finds that cloud-based software-as-a-solution (Saas) options can improve BOM management, reducing challenges and seamlessly incorporating up-to-date data from various internal and external sources. Instead of losing track of design changes, changes are integrated automatically. Stakeholders are all operating from the same information, reducing delays and waste. This means you're no longer directing air traffic via spreadsheet. To learn more about BOM management, check out our recent eBook at the link below. Lifecycle Insights is a trusted research, advisory, and publishing firm providing data-driven insights. We publish research, educational, and advisory insights on technology-led engineering initiatives, enabling better investment and adoption decisions.

How should SMB executives navigate #digitaltransformation in #engineering? Last year, we wanted to understand how small to medium-sized businesses pursue engineering transformation (EX). We conducted a study with respondents from multiple industries and company sizes. We summarized our findings in The SMB Executive's Guide to Engineering Transformation: How to Avoid Disruption without Breaking the Bank. The results clarify which organizations navigate engineering transformation successfully - and what sets them apart. We're excited to share this research so you can engage EX competitively. It's an increasingly competitive landscape for all engineering executives, but small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have even less room for error. Engineering transformation initiatives will always come with a cost, but they're essential for companies to improve outcomes. Well, our research shows significant differences between SMBs that adopt EX initiatives successfully and those that struggle to do so. Some of those differences emerge when an SMB prioritizes one kind of change while neglecting the others. Our findings show that SMBs pursue technological changes at rates near or higher than our top-performing respondents. That's great! However, SMBs pursue changes in organization and process at rates closer to those of our lowest-performing respondents. In fact, "just 27% of SMBs established formally documented changes to their processes and practices as part of their approach to EX, compared to 34% of Poor Realizers. Value Realizers, however, established such changes at a considerably higher rate (42%)." This data demonstrates the struggle when SMBs focus on one-third of the EX "engine" without also investing in other kinds of change. This report delves into the study's results and clarifies the defining characteristics of SMBs that realized the most benefits from EX with the least disruption. Quantifying those characteristics, we then compared SMB EX approaches with those of the highest—and lowest-performing respondents. Some takeaways include minimizing disruption, what SMBs get right in their approaches to EX, and how SMBs can refocus on the synergy of coordinated change across domains so the EX engine is fully optimized. That way, you're not bogged down in high disruption and low returns. Instead, you can invest strategically in engineering transformation that builds for the better. We want to thank Siemens PLM Software for their support of this study. To learn more about SMBs and engineering transformation, dive deeper into our research at the link below. Follow Lifecycle Insights for #research and guidance on #digitaltransformation for #engineering and #manufacturing #executives. We'll be sharing more insights like this one from our interviews, studies, and publications. Stay tuned!