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Learn about Autodesk Platform Services and Autodesk’s future vision for cloud product development, recently announced at Autodesk University.

We’ve all been through disruption recently. It feels like a decade of change crammed into a couple of years. But change has always been a constant, and we’re all deeply curious about the future of technology. It’s important to know how your industry is changing and what you can do to equip yourself and your business with the resilience to adapt to this changing landscape. 

Making your businesses more resilient is critical. Maybe it’s managing through a labor shortage or dealing with supply chain disruptions. We’ve all experienced difficulty in the last few years, and we’ve all learned lessons. 

In a world where things are constantly changing, we need to be willing to change how we get things done. We need to acknowledge that how we’ve done things in the past may not be what’s needed for the future. It’s time to imagine new ways of working to enable us and our businesses to thrive. 

Embracing digital transformation

You may already be embracing digital transformation – connecting your data, your processes, and most importantly, your people. The way we collaborate has changed — and it’s changed forever. It’s about time that the software tools you rely on keep up. 

There are many tools available today from so many providers. Some of them are closed and leave processes disconnected. They force you to build manual workflows and figure out how to pass huge files back and forth. As you do this, may overshare valuable data – your intellectual property. And let’s face it: no one likes an over-sharer. 

Data gets lost in translation and needs to be patched back together — over and over again. And when data and processes are disconnected, teams are too. People stay stuck in their silos, confined to whatever phase of the project lifecycle they work on. And so do the unique insights they bring to the table.

It’s time for us to disrupt ourselves and pursue different ways of working. 

Introducing Autodesk Platform Services

Last year, Autodesk started to build a platform that helps connect your processes and data in the cloud. We recently announced at Autodesk University 2022 that we’re now well on our way. 

We’re making great progress in building three industry clouds: 

1. Autodesk Fusion for Manufacturing 
2. Autodesk Flow for Media and Entertainment
3. Autodesk Forma for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction

Each cloud will enable you to manage your assets and workflows more efficiently to connect the right people to the right data at the right time.  

These Autodesk industry clouds aren’t simply incremental improvements to the software you already have. They will help drive an entirely new way of working. Helping you connect the entire lifecycle of your projects. They’ll bring the capabilities you know and love from the current Autodesk portfolio together in new and powerful ways that will transform the way you work.

Autodesk Fusion

For decades, manufacturing companies have locked down their processes, making their production as lean and efficient as possible. But with the pandemic, teams who were used to working in person were suddenly distributed. Standalone tools serving standalone departments couldn’t flex to meet everyone’s needs. 

Today, manufacturing requires tools that are fluid, not rigid. Tools that enable teams to work with agility and with all their stakeholders. This is the vision for our manufacturing cloud, Autodesk Fusion.

If you’re currently using Fusion 360, you know how quickly it helps you iterate. That’s because we’ve worked hard to unify design, simulation, electronics, CAM – and of course, data management. And with your project data unified in the cloud, we’re automating many processes to eliminate both guesswork and grunt work. 

Soon, you’ll be able to create part designs and generate toolpaths automatically. You’ll even be able to generate drawings and dimensions automatically. But the cloud is going to take Fusion much further.  

Connecting the top floor to the shop floor

We want all data relevant to a product’s development – how it’s designed, how it performs, how it’s manufactured – to be unified and flow throughout your organization. From the top floor to the shop floor. 

Shop floors are tremendously dynamic environments where downtime is costly. In addition to manufacturing processes, we’re also digitizing shop floor scheduling, purchasing, and inventory management with Fusion Operations, which we’re integrating into the Fusion cloud. Additionally, we’re bringing Fusion to mobile devices that shop floor staff rely on. 

Building fluid tools that span every phase of a project takes time, but we’re making huge progress on the foundation — the shared set of services and APIs that will make all three industry clouds accessible, extensible, and open.

Open standards for a flexible future

We’ll be building a lot more functionality into the services over time so that you can use them to extend and connect our products, streamline your workflows, and integrate other tools you rely on.

And you can take advantage of the applications and extensions that third parties have built to remove friction and add value to your business today. For example, a Fusion plugin for immediate feedback on the cost and manufacturability of your parts. There are many great options that are ready for you to use. 

Platform services and APIs sit at the heart of our cloud environments. And so does a central cloud information model. It’s where the different representations of a product come together in one central location. 

And each collaborator can access just the data that they need when they need it, share it with the right stakeholders, and move it between solutions critical to your operations. Whether that’s Autodesk tools or other products you rely on.

Open standards make that possible. They’re a key area of investment for Autodesk because we want your teams to be connected throughout the entire project lifecycle and beyond, no matter what software you use. Open standards ensure our platform remains an open ecosystem that our tools — as well as third-party tools — can plug into.  

This is about more than your adoption of digital tools. It’s about transforming the way you work with more fluid, connected, and informed workflows. 

Download Fusion 360 today to get started.