Uploading something “to the cloud” has become common enough that most people are acutely aware of the storage advantages of cloud services—whether in their personal or professional lives—as well as how they might benefit administrators in any business. What might surprise people is the additional ways in which the cloud offers efficient solutions for the manufacturing industry, both in terms of handling documentation and sharing data. In an interview with Stephen Graham, the executive vice president and general manager of Nexus, Hexagon’s cloud-based platform for digital engineering and manufacturing, Quality Digest further explores this topic.

Quality Digest: How does cloud use improve the efficiency of documentation in manufacturing?

Stephen Graham: The cloud enables effortless data sharing between engineers, software tools, sensors, and machines—helping manufacturers overcome technical barriers and build efficient engineering and manufacturing workflows. Manufacturers tend to be organized hierarchically in silos, and this creates data silos between different functions such as design, manufacturing, and quality inspection functions. This impedes collaboration and leads to inefficiencies that contribute to long product development life cycles and impede agility. A cloud-based data-centric architecture enables seamless connectivity and collaboration across the digital thread.

QD: How does Nexus improve product development and upgrades?   

Graham: Nexus helps customers accelerate innovation through productivity-boosting digitalization, AI, and open integration experiences with Hexagon and third-party platforms and data. It enables real-time collaboration within and between disciplines, and agile feedback loops that accelerate innovation. The platform’s open and flexible data-centric architecture offers customers several distinct integration options to connect a wide variety of third-party applications, from simple file exchange to real-time data sharing powered by Microsoft’s Fluid Framework. 

This versatility enables seamless connectivity across the digital thread, linking engineering tools across production systems, shop floor IoT, and quality data sources together with enterprise systems such as MES, ERP, PLM, and other systems of record that have traditionally operated in isolation.

QD: How does Nexus incorporate AI, and is it more predictive AI or generative AI?

Graham: Nexus is used to build workflows that encourage real-time collaboration between engineers and other workers. Once a workflow exists, autonomous collaborators can be introduced into the mix, including those built using AI. Built on Hexagon’s decades of expertise and Microsoft’s latest cloud and AI technologies, it already includes AI collaborators using machine learning, predictive, and generative technologies.

For example, Nexus recently unveiled an automated computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) programming tool called ProPlanAI that cuts the time taken to program factory machine tools by 75%.

Traditionally, programming automation used a rule-based approach and it could take a dedicated person weeks or longer to write these rules. ProPlanAI with Copilot self-learns using closed-loop machine learning and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to rapidly deliver high-quality, efficient toolpaths. 

QD: What distinguishes Nexus from other cloud platforms?

Graham: Nexus is a digital industrial platform for manufacturers to connect and collaborate across people, technology, and data. It is a system of engagement that complements classic enterprise systems (like ERP, PLM, MES and QMS) that are often used as systems of record. Nexus provides real-time connectivity between these systems, and engineering tools to enable collaboration across the product development life cycle to drive innovation. 

Nexus is also an open platform that easily connects to technologies from any supplier—not only Hexagon—allowing Nexus to meet customers where they are, starting with technology they already own and evolving at their pace toward digital transformation.

QD: Where, other than Hexagon, is this used, and how compatible is it with other storage solutions and systems?

Graham: While Nexus is used within Hexagon, it was developed for our customers and is in use at several major OEMs and smaller suppliers within automotive, aerospace, and other discrete manufacturing industries worldwide. And the responses from our customers have been encouraging, to say the least.

QD: What aspects of this technology make the company more competitive?

Graham: Nexus solves a critical problem impeding digital transformation. Manufacturers have made huge investments in digital technologies over decades, but this has been done in the context of complex, siloed organizations. The fleet of technology within a given manufacturer is therefore unlikely to interoperate, and so true digital transformation either requires rebuilding everything from the ground up or finding a solution to connect existing technologies. 

Nexus positions Hexagon as a leader in digital transformation by combining our own broad portfolio of manufacturing technologies with a platform that can solve this connectivity problem across technologies from any vendor.