Hexagon and Microsoft have joined forces to redefine how engineers collaborate and drive innovation within the discrete manufacturing industry. This strategic partnership aims to accelerate product development and enhance confidence by seamlessly connecting data from virtual engineering processes with real-world measurements of manufactured products.
The collaboration leverages modern cloud infrastructure to bridge manufacturing and engineering systems, including Microsoft 365, empowering employees with improved productivity through cloud-accelerated simulation and AI. This integration allows manufacturers to connect their daily office documents and processes directly with manufacturing tools. For instance, tooling cost data from a Microsoft Excel worksheet can be effortlessly shared with a CAM programmer, streamlining workflows and optimizing decision-making.
Furthermore, the partnership enhances collaboration across the manufacturing value chain and promotes the adoption of digital twins to expedite product innovation. Hexagon and Microsoft have collaborated extensively on the Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay service to facilitate real-time data sharing across various manufacturing industry processes and systems. Data created in one system is instantly accessible to anyone or any machine operating in another, fostering seamless data exchange.
This partnership integrates the Microsoft 365 ecosystem into this data layer, providing customers with the capability to connect their day-to-day office documents and processes with manufacturing tools, empowering teams to innovate with their preferred tools. Microsoft Teams calls can become interactive working sessions, enabling CAD, simulations, or metrology point clouds to be seamlessly visualized from the source data, allowing for on-the-spot collaboration and swift, iterative teamwork across engineering and manufacturing functions.
Hexagon has already showcased this capability in its Smart Factory at its facility in Wessling, Germany. By integrating generative AI models into its manufacturing software, Hexagon empowers users to harness the full potential of their capabilities. Existing datasets are analyzed to identify best practices for achieving desired outputs. These contextual advisors enhance productivity for experienced users and accelerate skill development for new users, mitigating the industry’s growing skills shortage in critical roles.
The partnership combines Hexagon’s manufacturing, engineering, and data science expertise with Microsoft Azure’s elastic computing and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. This enables engineering simulations to be accelerated by up to three orders of magnitude, streamlining design and engineering workflows, enabling manufacturers to deliver innovative products to market at an unprecedented pace.
Hexagon’s machine learning technology optimizes heavy-load simulations, enhancing their efficiency. Azure customers can leverage their existing contracts to access this machine learning-accelerated compute service through Nexus, enabling teams to utilize their existing IT infrastructure.
By integrating Hexagon’s measurement and reality capture technology with Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem, the Nexus open-access platform lays the foundation for agile engineering applications and industrial metaverse use cases. A digital twin leveraging Azure’s compute power for simulations can now utilize Hexagon’s real-time data capture and present information to users without complex systems integration. Implementing these technologies empowers manufacturers to create new workflows across the product lifecycle, expediting time-to-market, optimizing factory-floor efficiencies, identifying manufacturing issues in real-time, and enhancing overall quality.
The partnership is driven by a shared vision to empower the workforce with the most up-to-date information, enabling them to bridge the gap between virtual designs and physical products. Hexagon and Microsoft have made significant progress within a short timeframe, leveraging cloud technologies to unlock new avenues for collaboration and data sharing. The strategic partnership elevates this collaboration, driving a shared vision and go-to-market strategy to help customers seamlessly connect their Hexagon tools and products with third-party engineering systems and Microsoft 365. This integration enables the development of entirely new workflows, increasing data visibility, fostering sustainable innovation, and boosting productivity from design and engineering to end-of-life management.
