AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
How Product Manufacturers Increase Profits and Sustainability with AWS and aPriori
By Chris Jeznach, Director of Product Marketing – aPriori
By Vedanth Srinivasan, Head of Solutions Engineering & Design – AWS
By Avinash Venkatagiri, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
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| aPriori |
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Today’s manufacturers face unyielding pressure to accelerate product time to market, reduce carbon footprint, and increase profits. These efforts are compounded by increased market fluctuations, supply chain issues, and rapid technological advancements which can lead to cost overruns, late-stage design changes, and reduced margins.
In addition to these external factors, internal hurdles such as siloed teams, limited collaboration, and data sharing affect product design and manufacturing process efficiency.
To address these challenges, manufacturers are adopting cloud solutions such as digital twins to gain new insights with existing data, improve collaboration across product and manufacturing teams, increase automation, gain detailed insights to reduce CO2 emissions (CO2e), and increase efficiencies across product design and manufacturability.
In this post, we’ll share how aPriori’s Manufacturing Insights Platform hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a unique, end-to-end digital twin solution that empowers manufacturers to unlock and identify new opportunities rapidly for innovation, growth, cost savings, and sustainability.
aPriori is an AWS Partner whose automated manufacturing insights help to eliminate product cost, improve productivity, and reduce products’ carbon footprint.
Snapshot of aPriori’s Digital Twins
The term “digital twin” initially referred to a virtual representation of a physical product (such as a 3D CAD design). Manufacturers are now using digital twins to simulate each phase of the design and manufacturing process by connecting digital product twins, digital manufacturing process twins, and digital factory twins. They are optimizing the entire product design and production process for end-to-end visibility across the product development lifecycle.
Connecting multiple digital twins enables manufacturers to run “what-if” scenarios regarding product cost, CO2e, manufacturing process, and supply chains–and make data-driven decisions quickly and accurately. By extending simulation capabilities throughout the product development lifecycle, manufacturers have the visibility to address profitability, sustainability, manufacturability, and risk simultaneously.
Figure 1 – aPriori’s digital twins for product development lifecycle management.
Here’s an overview of each aPriori digital twin:
- aPriori Digital Product Twins: This refers to 3D CAD models, which are virtual representations of physical products that include components and assemblies. aPriori provides the digital product twin framework to analyze product designs, simulate design changes and their effect on manufacturability, cost, and sustainability, and provide automated guidance to identify potential design issues.
- aPriori Digital Process Twins: This determine the most effective way to manufacture a product by simulating manufacturing processes and routings (compare injection molding vs. additive manufacturing options). aPriori’s physics-based manufacturing process models enable manufacturers to explore production alternatives down to the machine level.
- aPriori Digital Factory Twins: These are virtual models of physical factories and include precise factory-specific production capabilities along with detailed costs for labor, electricity, materials, and overhead rates in 87 regions globally. Manufacturers also use digital factory twins to help evaluate their supply chain CO2e across the value chain (Scope 3) by analyzing suppliers and their own factory operations.
Advantages of aPriori’s Connected Digital Twins
Today’s complex business environment requires digital twin technology to address current challenges and be flexible to support new capabilities. Connected digital twins can drive added value throughout the product development lifecycle with features including:
- Simulation: Manufacturers use aP Pro and aP Design to simulate 3D CAD model changes to compare tradeoffs and make effective design decisions. aPriori automatically analyzes 3D CAD files in product lifecycle management (PLM) systems and creates detailed recommendations that engineers can evaluate to eliminate potential manufacturability and cost issues. Using digitalization technology, aPriori simulates a variety of manufacturing processes including additive, assembly, casting and forging, composites, electronics, heat and surface treatment, machining, metal fabrication, and plastics. By extending simulation capabilities throughout the PLM, manufacturers have the visibility to proactively address potential supply chain and manufacturability issues, capture additional savings, and reduce carbon emissions.
- Integration (digital thread): The digital thread ties multiple digital twins together and connects product data to a centralized PLM system enabling a single source of truth for product specification and bill of materials (BOM) data. Digitalization also connects PLM data to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other systems, and can extend business processes across traditionally distinct operations (such as product design and sourcing).
- Automation: With aPriori, manufacturers gain automated design guidance for each product design change. Additionally, aPriori’s automated reports highlight specific design issues to review and address. Teams can configure automated workflows and set alerts to appear only when individuals are assigned tasks improving employee productivity. Authorized users can access automated reports to see the status of key performance indicators (KPIs) including cost, carbon, and manufacturability.
- Collaboration: aPriori ensures all teams in the product development lifecycle can analyze data and collaborate more efficiently, assign and manage tasks, and use traceability for better communication and seamless collaboration, which are all important features for growing teams like product design, cost engineering, sourcing, sustainability, and manufacturing.
Figure 2 – aPriori manufacturing insights address critical industry priorities.
AWS Powers and Secures aPriori’s Cloud Insights
Manufacturers need to maintain resilience by accessing their product designs and other intellectual property (IP) securely on a 24×7 basis. That’s why aPriori uses AWS services to maintain a highly available and scalable solution for manufacturers with a global footprint. AWS also enables aPriori to comply with security protocols to ensure only authorized users can access information stored in a manufacturer’s database.
A cloud-hosted solution means there’s no customer infrastructure 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. aPriori uses third-party provider Auth0 for 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. An AWS Web Application Firewall, combined with Elastic Load Balancing, protects the environment from application-layer exploits and balances traffic across multiple aPriori container-based services.
aPriori users upload files by either a PLM agent (queries the customer-managed PLM environment for CAD files and associated metadata) or through the local user’s file system. All user CAD data is encrypted in transit and at rest using AES256, where keys are managed by AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).
CAD files are uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) in customer/region-specific S3 buckets where customers can configure a CAD file retention policy to remove CAD data after a specified time. 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 (ML) combine to provide near real-time alerting of events.
Figure 3 – aPriori reference architecture on AWS.
Carrier Saves Tens of Millions Using aPriori and AWS
Carrier is a $20.4 billion global provider of safe and sustainable building and cold chain solutions. It uses aPriori to generate highly accurate “should cost models” in just minutes. Carrier is also using aPriori to help meet its aggressive emission reduction goals.
Manufacturers have historically used spreadsheets or traditional cost estimation software to develop product cost models. However, these options are not well-suited to generating accurate manufacturing cost models for a high-tolerance, multi-faceted production process. Precisely modeling manufacturing costs for this assembly without the capability to analyze an actual 3D model was simply not possible, and aPriori enables Carrier to generate precise should cost estimates quickly.
Carrier uses many of aPriori’s global digital factories to generate models across manufacturing processes required by its products. In addition to utilizing customizable digital factories, the company has developed several in-house manufacturing cost models to reflect Carrier’s unique designs and production requirements.
aPriori’s configurable digital factory approach has allowed Carrier’s should cost professionals to build detailed, highly accurate models of suppliers’ costs for rotor manufacturing. These manufacturing cost models are based on the precise tolerances required by Carrier for every design aspect.
More than 125 Carrier employees use aPriori worldwide (with plans for further growth), including design engineers across their diverse global operations. PLM integration allows designers to integrate aPriori’s insights with minimal disruption to their existing workflows, streamlining adoption and accelerating uptake by engineering teams.
Carrier has saved tens of millions of dollars using aPriori’s cloud solution, and aPriori provides the Carrier team with access to the full Manufacturing Insights Platform from any internet browser anywhere in the world.
Additionally, Carrier is using aPriori as a critical tool in its mission to achieve a gigaton in carbon emissions reduction by 2030. The company’s aggressive environmental, social, and governance (ESG) plan calls for a more than $2 billion investment in solutions that incorporate sustainable design principles and minimize the lifecycle impacts of their products.
Conclusion
Companies use aPriori’s automated manufacturing insights to eliminate product cost, improve productivity, and reduce their products’ carbon footprint. aPriori also boosts manufacturers’ digital thread investments to deliver business value at scale, increase agility, and minimize risk.
According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, aPriori customers achieve ~600% ROI within three years and payback within six months of adopting its software platform. To learn more about aPriori’s solutions, visit apriori.com.
Resources:
- aPriori product pages: aP Pro | aP Design | aP Workspace | aP Generate | aP Analytics
- Carrier case study
- AWS Solutions Library: Product Cost Management
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aPriori – AWS Partner Spotlight
aPriori is an AWS Partner whose automated manufacturing insights help to eliminate product cost, improve productivity, and reduce products’ carbon footprint.