Shannon McGarry
The digital factory revolution, founded on robust data, will drive more significant changes in the planning, design, construction, and operation of factories in the coming years than in the past century. Autodesk is here to assist companies in navigating and succeeding in this transformation across various industries and technologies.
In today’s rapidly evolving manufacturing landscape, factories are no longer just physical spaces where products are assembled. They are dynamic, data-driven environments that require strategic planning and continuous optimization. The rise of the digital factory offers manufacturers critical benefits in efficiency, innovation, and stability. However, these benefits are only fully realized when factories are treated like products themselves, with a lifecycle approach that leverages data at every stage.
3 key trends impacting the race to digital factories
- The industrialization of construction. From increased prefabrication to productization to design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA), an industrial mindset enables teams to connect design to make. Thus, shifting decision making earlier in the lifecycle, by creating standardized, repeatable processes.
- Bad or missing data. Up to 52% of rework is due to poor project data and miscommunication. Leaders realize the need to transform from a construction company into a data company by capturing more data and using it to automate manual processes.
- Skills gaps and labor shortages. In the United States alone, there are 393,000 manufacturing jobs that need to be filled. In addition, a full 77% of manufacturers have difficulty filling jobs and finding skilled workers. At that rate, 2.1 million manufacturing jobs will go unfilled by 2030, costing the industry $1 trillion.
Embracing lifecycle thinking in digital factory development
Just as products go through a lifecycle—from concept and design to production and distribution—factories, too, should be developed with lifecycle thinking. This approach involves four interconnected phases:
- Planning. Starting with logistics, product offerings, and operational layout, successful companies break down all of their workflows step-by-step. This involves determining each station location, equipment placement, and the optimal configuration to maximize productivity.
- Design. Cross-disciplinary teams work together to plan and set objectives for both the building and the factory operations. Engineers determine how to lay the plan out in physical space. And other stakeholders get involved, pulling from the same plan to design their specific area. Examples include an ergonomics team evaluating workstations, or the HVAC team mapping the movement of air through the facility.
- Build. This digitally orchestrated process leverages BIM to coordinate between multiple teams—such as architects, engineers, contractors, and production engineers. This helps reduce the risk of cost and schedule overruns.
- Operate. A factory is one of the largest investments a company can make. With the right approach right from the start, successful manufacturers can deliver product development agility, optimize production line throughput, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) to meet even the most aggressive business objectives.
Traditionally, these phases have been treated as standalone, siloed processes. However, the reality is that they overlap significantly, and decisions in one phase often have unintended consequences in the next. By connecting these phases through seamless data integration, manufacturers can create a more efficient and effective development and operation process.
Achievement unlocked: benefits of the digital factory
The prospects for digital factories have never looked brighter than today—and the opportunities are only accelerating. Imagine…
- Creating a coherent and integrated digital twin of your factory to optimize every stage of its development and operation.
- Building an accurate and flexible digital representation of your factory operations, workflow and layout so you can test, optimize and change your layout to avoid machine down time, or adjust your workflow for specific production runs.
- Compressing your factory development lifecycle, and transforming sequential siloed approaches into something more agile that can unlock cost and time savings in development, but also accelerate time to market and revenue during operation.
- Connecting data to create an accurate building replica that also includes facility management data —warranties, installation dates, and manufacturer information —to ensure you can continually optimize your factory across its entire lifespan.
Northvolt: driving sustainability through a digital approach
What sets Northvolt apart from other battery manufacturers is their commitment to sustainability. Founded on a mission to design the industry’s greenest battery, Northvolt relies on Autodesk’s integrated software to help their teams connect design and manufacturing through a digital factory approach.
Teams work within the Autodesk ecosystem to ensure that data is captured at every stage and that each stakeholder has full visibility into the process. Architects use Revit to design the facility, while engineers use Factory Design Utilities and Inventor to plan the factory layout. Even more, construction teams use Autodesk Construction Cloud for model management and coordination.
With a digital factory approach, Northvolt has optimized factory design to operate more efficiently and reduce costs. Ultimately, paving the way for the industry to recognize that sustainability and profitability can co-exist.
How Autodesk can help in your digital factory journey
We sit in a unique position astride the intersection of several industries, including architecture, construction, and manufacturing, with technology in both building information modeling and manufacturing. And with that experience, we’re perfectly suited to help our customers.
We can help you manage, organize, and connect project data across our industry clouds, but even more importantly, across all of our cloud-based Autodesk products and third-party solutions, via Autodesk Platform Services APIs.
Currently, our data platform is already powering interoperability between Revit and Inventor, between Inventor and Fusion, and between AutoCAD and Fusion. And these relationships will only get stronger in the months and years ahead. Let Autodesk help you on your digital factory journey.