NavVis Digital Twin Use Cases

When making decisions that are critical to your business, you’ll want to have all the latest information at your disposal.

This is the situation that a global operations manager and their team will find themselves in on a typical workday, presented with a multitude of choices spanning their entire production and sourcing network. Without the full picture, decisions take longer, and those delays can ripple outwards to impact productivity and efficiency.

But why are they required to make such choices in the first place?

One reason is the need to optimize the global production network because of shifting market demand or technological trends. A global operations manager will have to quickly evaluate the status quo and then initiate improvement and change projects.

Another reason is that, if they operate in a highly competitive market, there is inevitably pressure to lower production costs, shorten lead times and time-to-market for new products or a product refresh.

Finally, there are customers who expect not only that the products they buy should be of high quality, but that they should be easily available and with a retail price they find agreeable. Otherwise, they can easily take their business elsewhere...

A standard practice in modern manufacturing is that production facilities are situated close to target markets or end-customers. But if your market is going through periods of volatility, where demand can suddenly rise and fall, production facilities need flexibility to allocate their manufacturing equipment.

To transfer resources within a global network, a central planning team will frequently evaluate their entire stock of machinery, e.g., large heavy equipment and assembly lines. The information they provide feeds into the logistics of transportation, organization, and installation of such equipment.

For this reason, planners need up-to-date CAD (computer-aided design) data of both the donor factory and the recipient. They’ll also need access to the latest documentation and evaluation on the condition of the equipment. And once the facility is disassembled, it's critical to know how to put it all back together at its destination!

Without proper documentation, planners may need to physically travel to the location to assess the status quo of the factory. If they can’t gather information in person, central planning teams may fall back on old and outdated 2D plans. This leads to further disruptions in operations and the delay of essential changes.

That’s where the NavVis Digital Factory Solution enters the picture. Using NavVis IVION Enterprise, 3D visualization software that's accessible from any standard web browser, factory planners have a powerful, easy-to-use tool to organize their assembly lines and install equipment.

Making operational improvements to a manufacturing facility can be carried out for a multitude of reasons – to save time, reduce costs, optimize processes and decision-making, and more. And one of the core activities to achieve these benefits is optimizing their layout and assembly line planning.

The layout of a factory or production facility has a significant impact on day-to-day operations. How far do the raw materials have to travel from the building entrance to the production line? How close is the machinery to the necessary ventilation ducts, lighting, or power outlets? And once the finished product rolls off the line, how long before it reaches the QA bench, then loaded onto transport? All these factors are critical, and a poor layout has real consequences for the bottom line.

Broadly defined, “layout and assembly line planning” is the arrangement of all equipment, machinery, and furnishings within a factory, in accordance with a company’s performance goals. Typically, a Central Factory Layout or Assembly Line Planning Department – or Industrial Engineering Department – would subdivide the task into conceptualization, detailed planning, and execution.

Modern reality capture and visualization technologies like NavVis IVION Enterprise and the NavVis Digital Factory Solution can make the process of layout and assembly planning more effective than ever before. Especially concerning the conceptualization and detailed planning stages.

In the scenario outlined in the video above, the factory planner needs to design a new layout regarding lean process improvement.

Here, a specific part of the plant must be remodeled in order to optimize material flow and space utilization, which would allow for an increase in production output for a given time. In NavVis IVION Enterprise, these areas can be identified and marked using a colorized overlay, uniquely named, and grouped into folders for even further clarity using the Mark & Measure tool.

Additionally, the 3D panoramic images in NavVis IVION Enterprise enable factory planners to remotely inspect the current usage and workplace set up in the specified area. Inspecting machine connections to the air, gas, and water supply allows for the planning of future machine requirements, especially when giving external contractors access to the virtual factory.

Let’s imagine that you’re a working on an assembly line in a factory. You’ve made an important discovery: moving a storage cabinet nearer to your workbench has improved your productivity by as much as 25%, because you don’t have to leave your spot to reach for the tools you use most often.

Naturally, your supervisor is delighted to hear this. They want to explore whether the same change can be applied elsewhere on the shop floor, or perhaps even in other production sites. If making such a simple change improves productivity for everyone else, the whole company benefits, so well done you!

Sharing best practices, of which the story above is a very simplified example, has great potential for increasing company productivity and efficiency. They can also mitigate errors and reinforce contingency planning. The critical thing is to document best practices fully and be able to share them easily.

Responsibility for documenting a best practice will lie with Continuous Improvement (CI) Managers. In this role, a local CI Manager not only submits best practices of their facility to Central HQ, but they’ll also evaluate whether best practices shared by the head office can be implemented in their own facility.

Further up the chain, central CI teams must assess the ideas and proposals for best practices submitted to them from multiple sites. If they’re viable, then the team makes them available to other factories while providing support for implementation.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? The challenge is that many valuable learnings too often go undocumented and aren’t communicated, because the processes of best practice sharing itself is too complex or time-consuming. Short-term productivity takes a dip if it takes a whole day to document a single best practice.

There is a better way. NavVis IVION Enterprise and NavVis IVION Go are a unique pair of visual tools that enable anyone on the shop floor to present new ideas from within their spatial context. CI Managers can share best practice initiatives with a URL that's easy to access, understand and implement.

In the scenario in the video, the CI Manager of a factory would like to share a best practice guideline on a process for foil-wrapped goods. Using NavVis IVION Go, they can position themselves at the shop floor's relevant area and, from this exact location, compile a detailed report of the improvements achieved. They can even take photos – or add images from a library – to enrich the description.

Shop floor workers can also follow the same process to share locally tested and proven solutions with the global CI team.

Back at the head office, a global CI Manager uses NavVis IVION Enterprise to review the proposal from a standard web browser.

If the assessment is positive, these best practices become candidates for rollout across the global production network and shared with a central team of continuous improvement managers.

Example features:

• An intuitive overview of all sites allows CI managers to quickly access best practices at any location.
• Geo-tagged points of interest can present information as documents, images, videos, and more, making it easy for every stakeholder to access and share knowledge throughout the company.
• The search box provides users with a quick way to find documented improvements.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are featuring more and more prominently in industrial environments. The data they provide help us to make smart decisions about the status of the production line, operations, and myriad tweaks to boost operational efficiency.

Within a modern production facility, multiple streams of real-time data are being generated not just by IoT sensors, but also cameras, programmable logic controllers (PLC), and manufacturing execution systems (MES).

By collecting and analyzing this information across multiple sources, operations managers situated either locally or globally can better optimize the predictive failure reporting in their factories, thereby increasing productivity while reducing maintenance costs and time to resolution.