Staying Ahead of the Field

CHALLENGE

A global agricultural equipment provider needed to create increasingly complex new machines faster, more efficiently and with greater accuracy. But data silos were making it difficult to see the full picture during product development. The company wanted to unify complex product data and make it easy for users across the product lifecycle to search, navigate and understand it in order to take the best-informed decisions.

SOLUTION

The organization is using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, including data intelligence solutions, to bring volumes of product lifecycle data together and enable advanced analytics.

BENEFITS

Contextualize product data on a 3D model makes it easy for different stakeholder teams to understand the information and work together. Data loading for entire machines has been reduced from hours to seconds, which will support faster issue resolution and minimize downtime in the field. Improvements in parts reuse and standardization have helped to streamline resources, freeing up 15 designers to work on other projects.

Helping Farmers to be the Best

Farmers around the world depend on agricultural machinery to help them grow, harvest and get their crops to market. They are working to advance agricultural practices amid rising costs, tight margins and changing climate conditions, and they cannot afford lengthy delays caused by equipment failure and downtime. To be the best in their field, they need machines that are efficient, intuitive and reliable.

A leading global manufacturer of agricultural equipment is committed to providing the advanced equipment that farmers need. It develops its own digital systems to help users make informed decisions and show them how the machinery is performing. Designing this advanced equipment is an increasingly complex process. Meanwhile, shortening development cycles and rising costs mean the pressure is on to get new products to market faster and more efficiently.

However, the company was struggling to see the full picture across its development cycle. The problem was that volumes of product data were spread across different locations, which were not all connected to the product. Creating continuity across all that data – and making it easy for users to navigate and understand – would be crucial to boost productivity, efficiency and accuracy.

Data collection is very important for us. We collect data in multiple processes but, in the past, we have managed it in silos – which has sometimes caused us to miss the connections between data. If we can connect all this data with the PLM system, we can make it available to all the people who need it. We can provide a complete picture of our machines for manufacturing, sales and service teams and our customers.

Agricultural Equipment Manufacturer, Head of IT

For decades, the company has trusted Dassault Systèmes to provide advanced solutions for product development. Now, they are partnering to support a Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach that provides a connected view across the entire product lifecycle. This fully integrated environment, built on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, combines Virtual Twin Experience and data intelligence solutions to provide advanced analytics capabilities

Putting the Product at the Center

One big challenge with complex agricultural machinery is that different groups – engineers, mechanics, dealers and the farmers who use the equipment – each have their own way of describing the same system. To make sure nothing is missed at any point in the product lifecycle, you need to make sure those groups all understand what the data is saying.

By connecting all the data to a 3D model of the product, the company can make sure everyone is speaking the same language. This approach starts with well-managed data, which is collected into one place, then used to create a virtual twin of the entire product. This digital representation provides a connected view of all the systems involved and how they work together, from electrics to hydraulics and steering modules.

One major goal was to speed up the time it takes to load the data for the virtual twin – and the solution did not disappoint. Now, it takes less than five seconds to load all the data for an entire combine harvester, a process that used to take around 50 minutes. That speed will enable the people supplying and maintaining the organization’s products to identify and resolve issues faster, minimizing downtime and disruption for farmers.

Being able to collect the data and load it in seconds is a key benefit for the dealers who sell our machines. It means that if there is an issue or a failure in the machine, we can help them to locate and identify it quickly. In the future, we plan to connect all the failure measure information so we can also provide it to more users.

Agricultural Equipment Manufacturer, Head of IT

Making it Easy to Find Answers

The data intelligence layout links complex data across multiple objects and processes and makes it easy for different MBSE stakeholders to search, navigate and filter it. As a result, they can quickly answer their business questions and work more efficiently.

For example, test managers can get an overview of all planned or scheduled test cases, see current test coverage based on requirement specifications, or find the results of all requirement-related tests. Department leaders can view a summary of scheduled test cases for their department, explore the current validation process for different models and variants, and analyse requirement specifications. Meanwhile, test and validation users can see the current state of their test specification and get an overview of all released stakeholder requirements linked to a specific function.

Intelligent Parts Management with AI

Parts management was another key focus area. Typically, if designers and engineers don’t find the part they need straight away, they will source or create their own. It’s a common problem for manufacturers, resulting in rapidly increasing numbers of unique parts, with substantial indirect costs as time and expertise are spent on needless tasks. It was also frustrating for designers, who had often asked for a fast and efficient way to identify similar parts.

To tackle this issue, the company has deployed the OnePart solution for sourcing and standardization. It uses AI technology to bring together data from multiple systems – such as design, manufacturing and procurement – and identify similarities between parts.

OnePart is already delivering significant resource savings. Designers find it easy and intuitive to use, with a reliable filter that helps them to narrow down their search results and make fast, informed decisions about which parts to use. In fact, they are spending so much less time on creating new parts that the design department has been able to move 15 people onto other projects.

Nurturing Future Growth

Just a few months after deployment, the solution is yielding impressive efficiency gains. But this is just the beginning.

Cloud applications could feature more prominently in the organization’s future, as users responded well when it recently tested the solution in the cloud. To pave the way, the firm is working with Dassault Systèmes to connect on-premise data with functionality in the cloud.

The company also plans to extend OnePart beyond design to other departments such as purchasing, which work in different IT environments. Encouraging designers to work in the cloud will promote better collaboration between those departments.

Users’ feedback continues to help shape the system as their ideas for enhancements and improvements are discussed in regular meetings with the Dassault Systèmes team. Designers, for instance, would like to extend the OnePart similarity search beyond individual parts so they can compare small assemblies – which are purchased from suppliers as a single part, but actually comprise several components. Being able to compare these assemblies will help the business to better understand their pricing and make sure it has spare parts available for them. Other features, such as automatic part suggestions during construction and similar part proposals during import, are also in the pipeline.

As the company continues on its MBSE journey, its partnership with Dassault Systèmes gives it the confidence to keep pace with these and other technology developments.

We have a clear picture of the benefits that Dassault Systèmes solutions will deliver – such as the savings in people-hours that allow extra budget to be spent elsewhere. That is why we keep working with them as the technology evolves. We always get a return on our investment.

Agricultural Equipment Manufacturer, Head of IT

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