Collaborative work experience connected and created in Hexagon’s Nexus platform, but fully integrated into a Teams call with an AI-assisted co-pilot in chat

Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft, which aims to redefine how engineers collaborate and enable the discrete manufacturing industry to innovate faster, with more confidence, and with new solutions that combine data from virtual engineering processes with real-world measurement of manufactured products.

The collaboration will offer solutions that use modern ‘cloud’ infrastructure to connect manufacturing and engineering systems — including Microsoft 365 — in Hexagon’s Nexus digital reality platform for manufacturers, and help employees increase their productivity through cloud-accelerated simulation and artificial intelligence (AI).

Hexagon and Microsoft have worked closely on the development and scaling of the open-source Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay service to support the real-time sharing of data across a wide range of manufacturing industry processes and systems, allowing data created in one system to be immediately available to any other person or machine operating in another.

Under the new partnership, the Microsoft 365 ecosystem will plug into this data layer, enabling customers to connect their day-to-day office documents and processes with manufacturing tools. This gives teams the freedom to innovate with the tools they already use; for example, tooling cost data from a Microsoft Excel worksheet could be easily shared with a CAM programmer, so simplifying work practices and decision-making between roles.

Interactive working sessions
Microsoft Teams calls can become interactive working sessions, with CAD, simulations or metrology point clouds seamlessly visualised from the source data to allow on-the-spot collaboration and fast, iterative teamwork across different engineering and manufacturing functions. Hexagon has already demonstrated this capability in its 3-D Whiteboard Nexus tool, which is also now available as a native app in Teams.

Hexagon is working with Microsoft to integrate generative AI models into its manufacturing software, helping users to make better use of their capabilities and analysing existing datasets to learn and suggest the best practices for achieving desired outputs. These AI experiences include contextual advisors, offering expert users productivity-boosting automation while also helping new users to upskill faster and achieve good results with less supervision — a valuable tool as the industry faces a growing skills shortage.

The partnership will apply Hexagon’s manufacturing, engineering and data science domain expertise and Microsoft Azure’s elastic computing and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to accelerate engineering simulations by up to three orders of magnitude, making it possible to streamline design and engineering workflows to deliver innovative products to market at greater speed. Hexagon’s machine learning technology optimises heavy-load simulations, allowing them to run more efficiently. Azure customers will be able to use their existing contracts to access this machine learning-accelerated compute service through Nexus — allowing teams to use the IT they already have in place.

Combining Hexagon’s measurement and reality capture technology and Nexus open-access platform with Microsoft's cloud ecosystem creates the foundation for agile and collaborative engineering applications and industrial metaverse use cases. A digital twin using Azure compute for simulations can now draw Hexagon’s real-world, real-time data capture and present information to users without complex systems integration. By implementing these technologies, manufacturers can create new workflows across the product lifecycle that shorten time to market, improve factory-floor efficiencies, identify manufacturing problems in real-time and improve quality.

Best cloud technologies
Stephen Graham, EVP and general manager for Nexus at Hexagon, said: “At Hexagon, we are on a mission to empower the workforce by presenting them with the best available information as soon as possible and helping them to close the gap between their optimal-performance virtual designs and the physical products that they manufacture. We have achieved a huge amount with Microsoft in a few short months by collaborating closely and applying their best cloud technologies to unlock new ways of collaborating and sharing data.

Our strategic partnership takes this to the next level, driving a shared vison and go-to-market to help our customers connect their Hexagon tools and products with third-party engineering systems and Microsoft 365. This allows for completely new workflows to be built, increasing the visibility of data, enabling sustainable innovation and increasing productivity from design and engineering to end-of-life management.”

Aleš Holeček, corporate vice president (office product group) at Microsoft, said: “Microsoft’s collaboration with Hexagon is driven by a shared belief that the future of work and productivity is grounded in collaboration. Similar to how Microsoft applied the Fluid Framework to our own Microsoft 365 applications, Hexagon has extended that same open-source data fabric to manufacturing problems, enabling real-time collaboration between the many engineering disciplines it takes to make a great product, through its Nexus platform running on Microsoft Azure. It is something that will push the boundaries for workplace collaboration for both of our platforms as we connect productivity with the engineering and operational technologies ‘makers’ need to be productive today.”