Halved product time to market with immersive design reviews for Siemens

Siemens in Congleton has been on a business transformation journey. The site in the northwest of the UK manufactures industrial drives for applications such as airport conveyor systems and they export 98% of the products they make to 78 different countries worldwide. It set an ambitious goal to become world-class in its field, with a clear goal to increase productivity to the tune of approximately seven per cent every year.  

To achieve this, Siemens implemented a ‘Factory of the Future’ initiative which embraces Industry 4.0 thinking through an integrated, end-to-end suite of technology designed to fully digitise the production environment.

‘Factory of the Future’ and lean methods incorporating immersive visualisation have resulted in...

• Seven-figure savings in just one plant optimisation case
• Halved product time to market, from 24 to 12 months
• Reduction in work cell lead time from 13 to nine weeks
• Reduction from an average of 50 issues down to nine, per new work cell

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Immersive visualisation as a key enabler

A critical constituent of the ‘Factory of the Future’ initiative is the connected immersive visualisation platform from Virtalis.  

The Visionary Render solution enables Siemens Congleton to have at its fingertips a realistic 1:1 scale virtual model of its evolving new products, manufacturing work cells and even its complete production environment. This enables all stakeholders to experience a virtual version of products as they are being developed, or all or part of the current or proposed future, production facility. Having this enterprise platform available as part of the digitisation of the Congleton factory enables teams to collaborate more effectively and communicate clearly using a common visual language. Visionary Render for engineering is therefore proving highly valuable in helping Siemens to realise its productivity targets.

“The Virtual Factory gives us a big-picture view, so we can identify areas to improve efficiency, cut out waste, and prevent problems in the physical world. This has resulted in more innovation, flexibility and productivity. ”

‍Andrew Peters, Managing Director, Siemens Congleton