Siemens expands Xcelerator platform across Siemens AG.
Update: This article republished Aug 11, 2022 after input from Siemens.
Siemens Digital Industries Software first introduced the Xcelerator portfolio 3 years ago, and now Siemens AG has expanded Xcelerator across all of the operating companies and divisions including Digital Industries (formerly Siemens PLM). The goal of the platform is to bring together the worlds of hardware and software across the domains of various industries, including buildings, transportation and power grids.
According to the company’s press release, Siemens Xcelerator is “an open digital business platform to accelerate digital transformation and value creation for customers of all sizes in industry, buildings, grids and mobility.” Even for an organization of the size and scope of Siemens, it’s a lot of words and a tall order of technology. Let’s break this statement down into digestible pieces to help us understand the overall goal of the Siemens Xcelerator platform.
Siemens AG is the parent organization of Siemens Digital Industries, which is the operating company that includes Siemens Digital Industries Software, formerly known as Siemens PLM. Siemens Digital Industries Software develops Siemens’ industrial software portfolio including Teamcenter, NX, Solid Edge and Simcenter, as well as other electronic design automation (EDA), design, manufacturing, simulation, automation, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) products and services.
Open Business Platform
The “open digital business platform,” according to Siemens, combines, “an online marketplace, ecosystem and a curated portfolio of digital and IoT-enabled solutions. These solutions come not only from Siemens but a growing ecosystem of partners and platform participants. Like consumer platforms, this has the requisite governance to manage the diverse participant types.”
Usually “platform” signifies that all of the tools come from a single supplier and that all of those tools are designed to work together. Advantages of using platforms can be in compatibility and pricing.
The “open” part of the phrase means that the platform will consist of offerings from multiple contributors, not just Siemens proprietary hardware and software. You are more likely to find best in class solutions in open systems.
While platforms are often closed to other developers or manufacturers, an open platform will allow for more suppliers to contribute to a wider ecosystem.
Digital Transformation
“Digital transformation” can be taken to mean the conversion of business to digital data and a digitalized process in business operations, design, simulation and manufacturing that links all areas of the business. According to a Siemens spokesperson, digital transformation allows a company “greater adaptability, connectivity to the supply chain and to pursue new business models.”
Digital transformation can start from various points within the organization and then merge. For example, enterprise resource planning/manufacturing resource planning (ERP/MRP) processes can start separately from CAD and product data management (PDM), but for the maximum benefit, these processes must all come together. This enables everyone from product development, planning, manufacturing, service, purchasing, marketing and other departments within an organization to be working from the same set of data with common lines of communication. Some of it is 3D data, some is multi-format communications data and also various types of documentation or process-based workflows.
Digital Twin
One of the benefits of Xcelerator platform is to provide access to digital twin data as needed throughout an enterprise. The digital twin is the digital representation of a physical object or system, including operating parameters and associated customer experience,
Digital twin technology can be used when working with buildings or energy grids. The idea is the same but 3D geometry plays a less obvious role. Buildings and indeed any energy consumption/production system can be set up as a functional model that produces or consumes energy and by-products at a given or variable rate over time. This type of model can be used to predict loads, demand, maintenance schedules, costs and other business drivers.
Industry, Buildings, Grids and Mobility
The industry and buildings portion of the statement refers to the design and manufacturing, as well as architecture, structural design and construction of buildings, structures and associated systems. Systems collect data and that data must be managed. Grids refer to the design and digital testing, scaling and security of the energy grid—at all points (from power generation to end-user consumption). Finally, the mobility portion of the statement refers to the Siemens company that produces locomotives and select other rail and light rail transport vehicles.
To this end, Siemens has joined various strategic partnerships with key players in other industries such as Nvidia, the leading producer of visualization hardware for computer 3D visualization. Visualization will apply to huge 3D scans of plants and facilities to enable virtual walkarounds, and to connect metadata to objects in a virtual reality setting. There are many applications in visualization that require hardware acceleration to make them practical.
3D data created by engineers is key to the entire process. Attaching metadata to the models and scan data helps bring some meaning and context to the rest of the enterprise connected by Xcelerator to portals and viewers. Also, simulation results of various kinds need to be available to those outside the engineering department.
Xcelerator Is a Top-level Siemens Initiative
Why is Siemens AG so interested in topics that are generally under the Digital Industries Software (formerly Siemens PLM) umbrella? For a company the size and scope of Siemens AG, one can understand the benefits of a single business platform for the company as a whole. It is also easy to imagine that as the company develops this platform for itself, it could also be of great interest to other large organizations to enable the same sort of top-to-bottom, all-encompassing platform that doesn’t rely on getting unrelated technology to work together. If everything were designed to work together as a single vision right from the start and intended to give a cohesive experience, the advantages would be numerous and likely produce time and money saving as well.
Siemens makes everything from design, simulation and manufacturing software to huge windmills, MRI health imaging machines, locomotives, energy management and much more. Products from each division either produce data or require a lot of data in the course of normal operation. IoT connections and the storage and retrievability of data is key to this operation.
Siemens Xcelerator is a platform that brings together all the pieces needed to help any large organization communicate internally and externally (with suppliers and customers). It is, at least in part, envisioned as a service, so software and data portions of it will be available online.
Xcelerator as a Service – Share Viewer/Markup
Siemens Digital Industries Software introduced its cloud-enabled subscription offering, Xcelerator as a Service (XaaS), last year. One of the key benefits of XaaS is access to Xcelerator Share, a cloud-based application that enables people with access to CAD data or Teamcenter to share 3D imagery and associated metadata with people who need access to the project. Xcelerator Share, in design engineer terms, might be called a modern view/markup application. It works online and allows permission-based access, so you can grant credentials to anyone, anywhere, anytime, as long as they have a device with Internet access.
Visualization is a proven way to communicate with nontechnical people as it is more concrete than written descriptions of a product or schematics. This visualization is key to the partnership developed with Nvidia mentioned earlier. Visualization can include huge datasets supported by metadata overlaid on a view of the physical world in a mixed reality display.
Xcelerator Share allows people without CAD access or expertise to visualize, explode and section 3D assemblies with full parts list, 2D drawings and schematics, simulation results and other documentation produced by PLM applications and stored in Teamcenter.
Summary
The Siemens Xcelerator platform is still in launch phase, which means that there is more to come. The newly available Xcelerator Marketplace will become a central access point for new and existing applications that will help organizations make the most of the people, processes and data connected using the Siemens Xcelerator platform. In addition, new applications similar to Share that help with buildings, energy and asset management, IoT and more will become available in the marketplace. Siemens says that because openness is an important tenet of Xcelerator, the marketplace will not be limited to solutions from Siemens and its partners.
With Xcelerator, Siemens is making the strong case that it should be the design and manufacturing platform your company chooses for digital transformation and that it can provide the benefits, efficiency and scale by connecting the digital and physical worlds.
