Integrated Factory Modeling with Northvolt

AXEL SAVE: All right, welcome everyone. My name is Axel Save. I'm manager of factory layout and modeling at Northvolt. In this session we were going to talk about factory-integrated modeling at Northvolt and how we are making the world's greatest batteries and enabling a factory of factories.

Jumping straight into it, Northvolt was founded with this vision-- this mission to build the world's greenest batteries-- period-- and, thus, enabling the future of energy, helping society on the electrification and decarbonization journey. We are a company with roots and based in Sweden and Europe, however, we are in a very international context. Our 5,000 employees come from over 120 nationalities. We are actively building this partnership network with customers, strategic partners, and supply chains across the globe using a unique vertical integration on a giga scale to really cover and help enable this path forward. We also firmly believe that using state of the art technologies is absolutely necessary to work on the scale and the speed that we need to help save the world and enabling the future of energy.

We will very quickly go into the nitty-gritty details here. I just want to show an overview of the Northvolt journey so far, with the emphasis on speed. So Northvolt was founded 2016 and already since then, on just seven years, we have struck multiple strategic partnerships. We have built a lab facility, we have built, commissioned, and producing in our first gigafactory in the Northern Sweden. We have signed multibillion dollar orders from several key partners, especially in the automotive and industrial sectors. And we have assembled and delivered the first commercial cells from our gigafactories. And this is just the beginning. But what is remarkable here and very, very critical for us is this speed-- how to scale and ship on a time scale previously unprecedented.

So if you're looking ahead, Northvolt has committed to 150 gigawatt hours of cell production by 2030. And in comparison, 2022, the total cell production in Europe was around 70 gigawatt hours. So this is a significant upscaling compared to what is available on the market today. Also, sustainability is at the very heart of everything we do, hence the world's greenest batteries. And we are committed to an unprecedented level-- 50% of recycled material in all of our cells by 2030.

And, finally, through a combination of new technologies, and active considerations for recycling, and 100% green renewable energies in the production, we aim to significantly cut the CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour of cell production to 10 kilograms compared to the traditional 170, 175 kilos [INAUDIBLE]. However, in this session, I want to focus on the first number. How are we going to achieve 150 gigawatt hours of production within just seven years?

So one key enabler for this exceptional journey from 0 in 2022 to over 150 kilowatt hours by 2030 is what we call the Blueprint. The Blueprint is a department, which I belong, as well as a toolbox, a mindset, and a philosophy for us to really enable this exponential growth in capabilities.

Here we have identified three key considerations in how to use the Blueprint and what it means for us. We're starting with the key one-- start of production and how to get there as fast as possible. It's very simple. We need to just cut design and execution timelines wherever possible. And throughout this presentation, you're going to hear me talk about modularization, standardization, and productization several times. And that's because it's at the very heart of how we think about this. We needed to deliver these Blueprints in a modular, standardized, and productization why-- way to really gain benefit and cutting on the project timelines.

It also helps us managing the rapid technology developments that's happening throughout battery manufacturing, and where we can do leaps throughout-- between the generations, and be very, very controlled but take calculated risks as we progress through generation to generation of our Blueprint.

I mentioned before our belief that we need to be on a very technical front here. And to do that, we need to be very data-driven in how we think. We need to talk cubic meter of facility per gigawatt hour of output. We need to talk about dollar of CapEx and OpEx per kilowatt hour of output. And we need to talk about kilowatt hours per kilowatt hour of energy needed to get a certain energy output. And we actually work with the very top of the technology to see how we can evaluate them, assimilate them, and see when does it make sense to move them into our production. Is it too immature? Is it worth the risk? Is it matching with the overall holistic design of the facility. This also helps us make very data-driven decisions in how and when to make continuous improvements to continue to learn from previous mistakes and to polish the designs as we move forward.

Finally, we need to be very, very efficient. We need to reduce engineering man's years needed. There are simply not enough engineer hours available for us with the correct competencies and the right timelines to achieve this by not optimizing and improving on our design and execution efficiency. Here the productization of the Blueprint is very, very key. We need to think of the Blueprint and the factory design as a product standardized and a very clear shipment execution. We also need to have this philosophy that enables us to run concurrently, to run not in series but in parallel with the product, with the production, and with the projects. And you will see more of that later.

And, finally, it helps by continuously tweak, not just on the technical side, but also on the product side what went well in the product execution last time. And since we are doing multiple factories, multiple industries in multiple countries, it helps us to hone how we do it again, and again, and again.

So from this overview of the Blueprint, let's move into my field of expertise and passion-- factory design and factory modeling. This is just a small part of this bigger Blueprint philosophy. And it will be the focus of the conversation today.

So when we're talking about the factory modeling principles, it is a foundation, but it's also [INAUDIBLE] very hard [INAUDIBLE] large extent a mindset. You need to think and care about the people as equally as much as your hard and technical aspects. Here once again we talk about standardization, modularization, and productization in the context of factory design and factory modeling. What do we mean with this?

For standardization, we think and consider the mindset that custom is slow. If you need to custom design every single time, you will inherently be slow. You need to standardize, and see, and move faster by knowing what you're doing time and time again. You can't make custom.

Secondly, consistency is quality. If you are very-- if you found a good way of doing it and it results in good quality, by doing it consistently, ensuring that you're doing it in the same way, you can be sure and comfortable that you will receive a good result, high quality, without too much double checks, and validations, and so on every single time.

Thirdly, reliability is scalability. Here is [INAUDIBLE]. If you trust your processes, if you trust your tools, and if you trust your people, you can scale. You don't need to have massive safeguards. You can take bigger calculated risks by doing [INAUDIBLE] reliable, which will allow you to scale very, very efficiently.

So when we talk about modularization, we need, as mentioned before, to think of our workstreams and projects as containers, buckets, whatever you want to call it and work in parallel. So serial work is too slow, waterfall style is too slow, you need to [INAUDIBLE] up your product, put them next to each other, and see how they work with interfaces and interactions rather than a serial A, B, C.

You also then need to enable this with flexibility in your products and your product configuration. And with this-- I mean that-- you need to make modules, and compartments, and boxes in your product that make sense. But then your project management structure also needs to be allowing for flexibility to deal with this interaction, to deal with the problems that might happen when you are taking calculated risk and moving in parallel instead of waiting and confirm, waiting and confirm, as a more traditional waterfall style of project would allow and enable. So your entire budget structure for the management structure, product configuration, all of this needs to jam together and allow for screw ups and mitigation in how to deal with problems very, very flexible.

Finally, you need to containerize. So in this we take a lot of calculated risks. We develop, we take, and we are bold to make this happen. But this also means that things go wrong. And for not your entire house of cards to fall down just because the dominoes start falling, you need to containerize and talk about your project, and your product, and your design as interfaces. You have a bucket or box and as long as you screw up inside of that one, it's fine. It's contained. As long as you're very careful of how the interface is interactions with the other containers will work, then you can proceed much more faster and with knowing that you will not have a domino effect of absolute chaos running through your design.

Finally, for productization, it's absolutely key to consider your factory a product of itself. It is not just a mean to a product. You need to think of the factory as a product assembly of subsets that in themselves needs to be cared about, you need to have a design framework, they need to be developed in conjunction with everything else to make a very solid product. You also, then, really need to think of the product, the production, and the product as one. They are developed in tandem. And one of them is influencing the others very, very closely, they are not the product of each other, they are one-- as every single product development project would know.

Finally, I firmly believe that a lot of companies in this world are over or below [INAUDIBLE] in terms of the design aspect. You need to be very, very lean and mean in your organization. You can focus a lot on bang for your buck in your productization by thinking as the factory as a product. You can think what is the features and the things we need to enable within this design order-- the order sheet for your product. And you can go very, very fast and very, very far on the 80/20 mindset with a small team and make sure that you iterate quickly. And then you go and you do all of the details. This allows you to find all the problems very fast and then spend your engineering hours very wisely.

So all of this boils down to a Blueprint mentality, where you take all of this mindset of standardization, modularization, and productization and put it in very simple terms-- keep, tweak, and leap-- where we think-- we keep what is great. What did we do good? And just copy paste to the next design. What was good but can be great that can be tweaked? And what needs to leap? What are the new process technologies, a fundamentally new type of product, or something we screwed up so badly that we just need to throw it out and rethink fundamental aspects of the design? And by having this modularization, the standardization, and the productization, this is a total mindset of how to run your iterations of design very, very efficiently.

So how do we do this in practice? I generally prefer to talk about three layers of design management-- design generation, design collaboration, and design management. And they are layers on top of each other, where at the very core the design generation is where you draw your drawings, you're modeling your models, you're calculating your calculations. The actual engineers sits with their specific toolboxes doing their specific tasks, actually making their designs.

However, in the modern way of doing designs, you cannot just sit on your own chamber, you need to collaborate. So once you have done your single design, each engineer needs to go to a collaboration platform where they can talk to their fellow engineers, coordinate who needs to move, who needs to improve, what information do we need to have, and basically run your daily engineering business, your daily operations to make sure to keep your holistic design moving forward.

Once you have collaborated and made your design, you don't need to manage it. You [INAUDIBLE] to keep it in a way that every stakeholders, not just the designers, but every stakeholder understands what is the single source of truth. What is the actual design that we are proposing and to enable very transparent change management for that design. So if a new request, a new feature, a new unexpected whatever comes up, there's a clear and transparent way of understanding how a certain change impacted a certain design change. This needs to be on this higher level of design management for all to understand.

So if we go by this one by one-- in design generation, I firmly believe that you cannot do the jack-of-all-trades approach. Every tool can be a hammer, that doesn't mean it is a good hammer. And we need to enable our engineers to give the right tool to make the best damn design they can.

We, thus, with this modularization and containerized approach in mind, have built up our toolbox so that every discipline have their best tools to do their work. And once again, standardization, modularization, and productization, is absolutely key in this mindset of how you are building this toolbox.

We have built with one toolbox per discipline, no matter your organization or your project. No matter if it is a permanent, full-time employee, an in-house consultant, or an engineering external-- engineering partner, everyone within a certain discipline needs to work with the same toolbox so that the designs can move together, so that they can be standardized, and so that you can reallocate your resources very, very efficiently, as needed, without moving between CAD tools or updated data sheets.

You need to enable this by template, guidelines, and internal quality control to ensure that you are compliant with this toolbox and that you are data-driven in that compliance, so that you actually know is everyone behaving the same way, is everyone doing the same thing, and are we getting the same quality output throughout the discipline and throughout the design.

We need to define metadata framework. Not all data generated in each of these boxes will be needed by every single other box, but some will. Some data will need to flow from the [INAUDIBLE] engineers to the architects or from the process engineer to the [INAUDIBLE]-- structural engineer. And you need to define what is that data and how do you move it. And what file formats, and agreed syntax, and just practically when and how, and does your toolbox need to enable that one way or another and standardized?

Finally, you need to centralize your assets because you need-- [INAUDIBLE] that not every single engineer and not every single discipline use their own locally stored asset library. I make sure that everyone has access to the same centralized library. You know that if the process engineer needs to do a change on a certain machine, that machine can be accessed and the change can be accessed for all other disciplines, such as MEP or structural. And you're looking at the same revision control and standardized library throughout the project and throughout the disciplines.

For modernization, you need, as mentioned before, to be easy to configure it with your engineering scope and focus. Not all projects will need all content. Not all sites will have the same requirements. And you need to be able to pick the parts from your toolbox needed for this kind of job. You're not bringing your entire workshop out on site. You're bringing the tools you need for the job here and now.

You need to make this toolbox plug and play. The scaling that we do comes with people. We on board, at the current rate, about 150 people to Northvolt every month. We bring in consultants and engineering partners very fluently as our needs come and go. And we need you our toolbox to be a gun and a rucksack and off to the war very, very fast and very, very efficient.

We also need to containerize as said with modules because we develop this constantly and in running production. And these bugs, and proof of concepts, and mishaps needs to be containerized within one toolbox and then interface managed towards the other discipline toolboxes so that you are not afraid of doing changes because you are afraid you are impacting someone else. You can derive the development of each of these toolbox full steam ahead, very bold, and very excellent to just make it happen without all of the house of cards falling together.

And for the product, as any product and any software product particular, we need to be very, very smart in this. We need to script and automate this so that we are very efficient with all of our resources throughout the project. As with any other product, the resources and the resource efficiency is absolutely key.

And I don't know how many here has been at IKEA kitchen configurator, where you pick whatever-- how you want the kitchen to look, but you need the same mindset for your design work. You need to be able to pick your tools, your products, your resources for this particular job. And it all should work in fundamentally the same way, just with different pieces.

All right, so now we have done the [INAUDIBLE] design. Now all of this needs to dance together. We need to enable true collaboration between the disciplines. We need to make sure that everyone sees the same picture, so everyone shares the same view of the status of the project. We need everyone to [INAUDIBLE] both the to-dos and the designs themselves, but also the understanding of where we are today at Autodesk vector design-- or, sorry, at Northvolt today. We're using Construction Cloud as this collaborating platform, where all these pieces can come together, look at the design, look at the design options, and agree on what is the best path forward.

So once we have agreed on this collaboration we then need to manage it. We need to think of the factory as a product and become a factory of factories. And with this, it means that we need to have a PLM, a Product Lifecycle Management System, where everyone can package their designs together. We can manage the changes and the configurations with very high visibility. We need to top control it and make sure that we are revising and reviewing it in a very standardized proper way and ship it so that we can think of this as different products and different product configurations.

This all then boils down that you can make-- be very, very modular in this. We can basically have one design management principle and then set up the collaboration environment and the different design packages in whatever configuration we need, depending on the product and the project needs at the time. And what this does allow is that customer demand and engineering resource availability are two points that sets the pace for how quickly you can design. The rest just scales accordingly.

And if we are working enough with our toolbox, that means that the resources should be a no problem, which means that the customer demand is the only thing that puts your [INAUDIBLE] for your factory design-- and that's a very pleasant scenario for any business that it just how much customers you have-- that sets the pace for how much you need to produce.

So wrapping all of this up, how do we achieve this integrated factory design. I believe that the factory modeling is a bridge between cross-disciplinary gaps. And to get this holistic design, we need to have holistic infrastructure. We need to really start talking about construction and process integration. There are today fundamental issues in how your-- CAD works, where you have process, project, machine, equipment-- CAD working very well in the one bubble and you have the construction-focused CAD in one bubble and they do not talk sufficiently. This just needs to be addressed. And this needs to be addressed on all levels-- design innovation, design collaboration, and design management-- so that we can not just design a machine and design a house but actually design a factory together.

We need to enable a more modern way of think of our partners and how we collaborate with our partners. We need to standardize how we change information between stakeholders, including vendors and external partners. And here I think the construction industry and the entire BIM mindset is miles ahead of the more equipment, machine-focused part of the industry, where the collaboration mindset of sharing information with standardized formats, with everyone looks at the same picture and collaborate, no matter their industrial background or their commercial organizational structure. This just needs to come together to the same better place.

And we see that the tools needed for the disciplines are becoming more and more specialized. And that's good because that means that you can enable your engineers to do more in their specific field but that is not mutually exclusive to doing cross-functional collaboration and integrate all of these specialized tools, all of these specialists to one partner, to one holistic design together.

And we need to modernize how we think about industrial norms and infrastructure, where the way of dealing-- setting up contracts, project agreements, timelines need to match the timelines that we have. The climate change cannot wait. It does not allow for the old way of doing things. We need to be very digital, very modern, and very open to the way we run it. And all of this old notions of a customer, and a service provider, or whatever, it needs to go. We need to talk about partnership. We cannot fix this alone. So we need to partner up and allow to move fast together and that is a benefit for all of us.

And, finally, we are at 2023 and the industry needs to step up their digital mindset. We need to have a holistic infrastructure and a mindset that allows us to break the traditional project and design silos and think holistically. This, together, will allow us to really build a factory of factories today for the factories of tomorrow. Thank you all for your attention.