Building product context before contacting suppliers
The worlds of heavy equipment (HE) and automotive are undergoing significant transformations driven by software integrations, flexible business models, and the constant goal of more efficient hardware usage. But while these two industries share many engineering challenges and even design solutions, there is a very notable chasm in how these products make it to market. And that divergence is scale. Heavy equipment is dwarfed in sales volume by the automotive industry creating additional engineering overhead when working with suppliers.
To talk about what these means in the era of software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and software-defined products (SDPs) more broadly, we sat down with Hendrik Lange and Akshay Sheorey for a three-episode series on the Siemens Automotive Podcast – On the Move. Hendrik is the Senior Director of Heavy Equipment at Siemens Digital Industries while Akshay is an expert on autonomy more broadly for automotive and transportation within Siemens Digital Industries Software. You can listen to part two below or keep reading for a high-level summary.
SDPs and SDVs are fundamentally reshaping supply chains for both industries, but the distinct challenges of the HE industry could provide a benefit to automotive OEMs as well. Due to the low volume of HE OEMs, much of the development of integrated systems has been done in house and then provided to suppliers. Many suppliers do not want to take on the engineering load when the actual sales numbers are so low, but this has benefited HE OEMs because they were better positioned to develop multi-domain and highly integrated systems from the jump. Automotive companies may not want to bring everything in house like an HE manufacturer but understanding how systems interact within a comprehensive Digital Twin (cDT) enables earlier error detection, faster design iteration, and forms the digital threads that will become valuable during the operational lifecycle of increasingly autonomous products.
Understanding the context of the product in the real world is another major consideration for HE OEMs and could help automotive manufacturers as they move to a greater number of regions as they expand. But it is also valuable in the roll out of software features. A mining machine for instance does not need to understand the crop lines as agricultural equipment would, just as a vehicle sold in North America would not need vision models that understand what a kangaroo. It could instead be simplified as a large moving object. But this is only a simple example, it would also apply to how vehicle software is updated – a vehicle owned in a metropolis may not be able to connect to a home internet network like a vehicle owned in suburban regions.
The software-defined vehicle is not new, but the scale at which OEMs are expecting to release and support them, a new set of solutions is required. The cDT is a great first step, as it combines the data available to designers, manufacturers, and even service technicians to both the digital data like simulations and the real-world sensor data to deliver the best solutions for a specific engineering challenge. For more information on SDVs and SDPs, make sure to listen to the full episode and maybe even some of the other episode of On the Move where we talk to other experts around automotive. Part one of the discussion is available here.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
