The ideas for product lifecycle massive simulations

I like Friday evenings. It is a time to relax and make some unusual reading of something completely outside of my regular reading themes. My today reading was about game changing technologies and startups. Navigate here to read CBInsight report. You can get report for free by providing your email.

So, you can ask what does it mean game changer? An event, idea, or procedure that effects a significant shift in the current manner of doing or thinking about something. A newly introduced element or factor that changes an existing situation or activity in a significant way.

I found interesting to set my mind to think about something big and disconnect from many small problems CAD and PLM companies might have today.

Here is CBInsight game changers – categories and startups.

My favorite category is massive simulation. The ideas of massive simulations is to learn real model, build a model, model simulation, get results, compare and improve model. What is the most fascinating in this category is global systems. Simulation is not a foreign word in a lexicon of CAD and PLM companies. For long time simulation was accompany engineers in their design and manufacturing processes. However, in many use cases it was a simulation applied to a single product (even such big as an aircraft, but still single product).

Recently “digital twin” and IoT technologies came together by introducing a unique possibility to get a real time feedback from manufacturing products and systems. By injecting these huge data streams in a simulation models, we can get to a very interesting outcomes. With such great potential where is a challenge?

It made me think about PLM innovation platforms and walled gardens. PLM vendors and systems are very protective and holding the data closed to their chests. Modeling global manufacturing system can be a big challenge without getting an access to the data. To get data for massive manufacturing simulation is a challenge, but it is also a huge potential game changer. With new insight on global manufacturing and supply chain, OEMs can operate differently. Just think about combining of potential availability of manufacturing capacities across the globe with manufacturing demand and scale it to a massive simulation to deliver a desired manufacturing outcome with a specific cost level. To me it sounds like a new way to think about global manufacturing. The systems capable to produce this data and sell the business outcome decision making engine can rule the world of future manufacturing similar to how Google and Facebook are ruling online digital world today.

What is my conclusion? Product information, design, bill of materials, manufacturing planning, supply chain networks, global components, customer demand. All together, they are representing a global manufacturing system. Digital twin and product lifecycle data can release a huge potential for simulating of production environment, factory management, components supply and logistics by pulling huge amount of data out of manufacturing and combining them into real-time data monitoring and decision management system. It is a massive scale simulation of manufacturing on a global scale. Just my thoughts..

Best, Oleg

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Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.