“The first wave of Industry 4.0 brought transparency and some predictiveness, but it did not really combine real-world data and the capability to simulate,” Pierre Bagnon, vice chairman, international head of clever business accelerator at Capgemini, advised Automotive News Europe. “There are still a lot of silos.”
In the automotive business, digital twins can break down the partitions between product improvement — the area of designers and engineers — and course of engineering, the place vehicles go from prototype to manufacturing, mentioned Bagnon, who labored at Robert Bosch for greater than 15 years.
“What we dreamed of was an ideally production-friendly product design,” mentioned Bagnon’s colleague Matthias Eisenschmid, vice chairman, head of automotive manufacturing and provide chain administration, Capgemini Invent Germany, and a veteran of manufacturing planning at Mercedes-Benz. Digital twins are a “game changer” for this use case, he mentioned, permitting product and course of to develop in a synchronized, parallel manner.
“You get a production line that is mature right from the start,” Eisenschmid mentioned. “In the past you had to spend a lot of time and money in physical production to ramp up and optimize the processes. Using an industrial digital twin, you can identify and solve most of your problems upfront in the virtual phase.”
Digital twins can shorten time to market by 20 to 30 %, enhance high quality by 20 % and useful resource effectivity by as much as 40 %, Bagnon and Eisenschmid mentioned. “That’s the magnitude of ambition that our clients are putting in place to justify the investment,” Bagnon mentioned.
“It’s a multimillion-dollar investment, but the more important question is what will happen if you don’t do it?” Eisenschmid mentioned. “There are new competitors who are already taking significant advantage of these new technologies as common tools.”
Source: www.autonews.com