Design for Excellence with Automated Manufacturing Simulation in the Cloud from aPriori

By Rick Burke, Vice President, Marketing – aPriori Technologies
By Scott Robertson, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Rajesh Gomatam, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

aPriori

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s all about first-mover advantage. Manufacturers that innovative quickly and reliably are well positioned to capture significant market share.

Accelerating product development and manufacturing requires companies to get it right the first time: the right features, performance, product margins, and supply-chain partners to meet aggressive launch dates.

But product companies often miss their targets due to understaffed product design, engineering, and sourcing teams, as well as the lack collaboration among these teams.

Companies are addressing these challenges by implementing technology that’s highly automated, runs silently in the background, and only requires the product team to get involved when a problem is identified.

Manufacturing simulation software enables organizations to simulate each step of the product manufacturing process, including primary and secondary operations. The objective of manufacturing simulation is to identify and quickly eliminate potential issues that could delay a product launch due to performance or supply chain roadblocks or inflate manufacturing costs.

The digital manufacturing simulation platform from aPriori connects directly into industry-leading product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. Each time a new or modified digital twin CAD model is checked into a PLM vault, it automatically triggers a detailed manufacturability and cost analysis—with minimal interaction required by the end user.

If aPriori’s software solution detects a potential manufacturability issue, the end user is notified via email and can then use aPriori’s manufacturability guidance application to quickly eliminate the problem.

Additionally, the sourcing team can leverage the rich manufacturing data generated by aPriori and stored in the PLM vault to improve the outcome of negotiations with suppliers. Team leaders and business executives can also leverage aPriori’s enterprise business intelligence (BI) reporting solution to track progress on new product innovation (NPI) initiatives to ensure profitability goals are being met.

Digital Factories and Design for Excellence

The heart of the aPriori automated manufacturing simulation platform is its digital factories, which provide manufacturability analysis and directional costing.

Digital factories also enable sourcing teams to compare production environments across an extensive range of manufacturing criteria to evaluate fully burdened manufacturing costs (design to cost / DTC) and inform site selection.

For a given product design, customers can use digital factories to identify and select less expensive raw materials, cheaper manufacturing processes offering faster cycle times, and alternative finishing options. The digital manufacturing intelligence output from a digital factory is what enables a variety of design for excellence (DfX) initiatives.

Figure 1 – aPriori digital factories enable DfX.

Maintain Security and Productivity at All Times

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s to prepare for the unexpected. Whether it’s the pandemic or environmental disasters, manufacturers must be prepared with a technology infrastructure that can be accessed by any authorized user, at any time, from anywhere.

Automated digital manufacturing simulation technology on the AWS Cloud leverages AWS services to provide the type of resilience that modern manufacturers need to withstand these kinds of crises and maintain productivity for critical new product innovation programs.

Leveraging the inherent security available with AWS, aPriori has implemented additional security protocols to ensure only authorized users are able to access information stored in a company’s database.

How it Works

aPriori is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leverages the AWS Cloud to provide a secure and scalable infrastructure for users. A cloud-hosted solution means there are no customer resources to deploy, and resources are automatically provisioned to support user demand.

Users access aPriori through a centralized identity management system, and access to any aPriori service must be approved by a business lead at the customer.

Third-party provider Auth0 supports multi-factor authentication (MFA) and federated single sign-on (SSO) support for additional user security. All aPriori applications use HTTPS or secure web socket communication. AWS WAF combined with Elastic Load Balancing protects the environment from application-layer exploits and balances traffic across multiple aPriori container-based services.

Files can be uploaded by either a PLM agent (queries the customer-managed PLM environment for CAD files and associated metadata) or through local user file system. All user CAD data is encrypted both in transit and at rest using AES256 where keys are managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

CAD files are uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) in customer/region-specific buckets where customers can configure a CAD file retention policy to remove CAD data after a specified time period. Amazon Aurora and Amazon ElastiCache combine to provide optimal user response times with sub-millisecond reads.

Finally, Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon GuardDuty continuously monitor the environment to protect accounts, workloads, and data stored in S3. Integrated threat intelligence, anomaly detection and machine learning, combine to provide near real-time alerting of events.

Figure 2 – Architecture diagram.

Summary

Manufacturers are faced with a wide variety of technical and macroeconomic challenges that often appear out of nowhere. These challenges trickle down to the department and individual contributor level and make an already difficult job even more demanding.

On a day-to-day basis, members of the design, engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing teams are wrestling with the twin challenges of creating innovative products and launching those products to market to gain first-mover advantage, along with an ever-collapsing product lifespan in the field.

The digital manufacturing simulation platform from aPriori is hosted on AWS enables design for excellence (DfX) initiatives. This helps manufacturers identify and eliminate issues early in the product lifecycle, reduce engineering change orders, accelerate time to market and reduce manufacturing costs—all with minimal disruption to your current operating environment.

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aPriori – AWS Partner Spotlight

aPriori is an AWS Partner whose digital manufacturing simulation platform connects directly into industry-leading product lifecycle management (PLM) systems.

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