Day Two General Session – Futureproofing Your Manufacturing
For the final General Session, we gathered to hear about all the amazing new manufacturing technology that is being made available to SOLIDWORKS users.
First up was Karine Gosse, Vice President of DELMIA R&D, who spoke of how Industry 4.0 initiatives are driving digital transformation efforts and helping companies to navigate through the many challenges plaguing the industry today.
Gosse discussed how DELMIA is a global enabler of sustainable operations that can help empower the workforce of the future, create a better world for people, and sustain company growth.
“Ultimately, our ambition is to help you innovate, continuously exploring new possibilities, new opportunities through modeling and simulation,” says Karine. “During this session, we will hear how you, our users, are innovating, what are the most important benefits for you, the most significant challenges, and we will discover some of your successes.”
Next, a panel of manufacturing panel of experts joined Barb Schmitz, Senior Marketing Manager at SOLIDWORKS, to discuss how to increase diversity in manufacturing. The panel included Meaghan Ziemba, founder of Mavens of Manufacturing; Titan Gilroy, CEO or of Titans of CNC; and Jeff Hohlfeldt, VP at Northern Industrial Manufacturing.
The panel discussed what needs to be done to increase diversity in the manufacturing workforce and the challenges around the shortage of skilled talent in manufacturing. Meaghan and Titan both work with outreach programs—Mavens of Manufacturing and the CNC Academy, respectively—and spoke about how increasing awareness of the benefits of a career in manufacturing is essential to broadening the reach and getting more people of all ages and backgrounds excited about pursuing careers in manufacturing.
Next up was Mike Buchli, director of Partner Sales at 3DEXPERIENCE Works, who brought Todd White, Owner of Todd White Metal Works, and his daughter, Saylor, to the stage. Todd spoke of his unique path to becoming a SOLIDWORKS user; he basically taught himself how to use the software by watching YouTube and any other resource he could get his hands on. After being employed by a startup that eventually failed, Todd and his family found themselves on the brink of homelessness. He told his story about how he built a successful business using one Tormach machine and his self-taught SOLIDWORKS skills.
Karine Gosse returned to the stage to introduce Al Bussboom, VP of Operations, and James Kucera, Process Engineer, both from Behlen Manufacturing. Behlen is an 87-year old manufacturing company that’s retooling its entire production facility to align with Industry 4.0 initiatives.
James talked about a current capital project Behlen is in the process of planning, a 200-foot-long assembly line. “The current assembly line can’t be moved to put that in so we have to do a lot of collaboration between the various business unit managers and manufacturing engineers.”
To help them plan out this project, Behlen created a virtual twin of its 850,000-SF production facility. First the Behlen facility was fully digitized in 3D, which created a 3 billion+ point cloud, and a 214-GB virtual factory model of every machine, part, tool, equipment, assembly lines, robotic cells, and so on. That data was then used in Factory Flow simulation software in the 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio to create the virtual twin. We’re certainly going to be watching as Behlen continues its digital transformation journey.
In case you missed it, watch our Daily Recap to get all the details of Day 2!
We return tomorrow for Day Three of 3DEXPERIENCE World 2023. Hope to see everyone tonight at the Special Event!
Barb Schmitz