Konecranes, a Finnish company specialising in the manufacture and service of cranes and lifting equipment, has implemented Siemens’ ‘digital innovation platform’ (www.siemens.com/plm) to accelerate its product development process and connect product and performance data together.

The crane company is using MindSphere — the open cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) operating system — and the Teamcenter portfolio of digital life-cycle management software to “leverage the digital twin and reduce the number
of physical prototypes”, with the aim of increasing efficiency and cutting product validation time.

Juha Pankakoski, executive vice-president (technology) at Konecranes (www.konecranes.com), said: “The product design process is currently based more on an engineer’s experience and generally shared assumptions than on measured facts from existing products.

"These assumptions often lead to non-optimised designs that are over-engineered. With an integrated digital-twin platform, we see significant potential to shorten the product development process, reduce prototypes and increase traceability, thereby improving quality and cutting development costs.”

Using the Siemens’ digital innovation platform, Konecranes has been able to connect all the appropriate data to create one 360deg view of how prototypes are performing.

Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO at Siemens PLM Software, said: “Bringing together assets from both the physical and virtual domains provides a seamless framework of business data which can help to eliminate re-work, leverage factual data surrounding prototypes, and provide closed-loop feedback regarding physical and virtual assets.”