Envision your factory running in real-time in a highly detailed 3D environment, well before actual production starts. A digital twin of your system, with precise product flows using accurate engineering models. A simulation that gives you full control of your development. With Prespective, you can!
With Prespective, you’ll have the tools to calculate throughputs and identify bottlenecks in your process. Capable of realizing speeds faster than real-time, our tool enables you to design, test, and refine with efficiency and precision. Easily share digital twins within your company and with clients. Create high-end marketing output directly from our software.
With Prespective, you are in total control of your development.
In Depth
Are you coping with the long lead times of a new factory and taking too long to get your new products to the market? Are you struggling with budget overruns due to complex commissioning? Have you ever misinterpreted sketches and design set-ups from colleagues or clients, for instance because of too little insight into new processes? Do you find it hard to discuss a new project with clients and co-workers? Or do you often try to solve a dynamic 3D problem in a static 2D design? Then, Prespective might be just the right solution for you.
At the moment, when companies plan their new factory floor, many will draw a set-up on paper, supporting it with static CAD drawings and Excel sheets as their main source of the desired set of machines, materials and other resources. This approach leaves room for individual interpretations and is therefore prone to error. Some companies might use rudimentary configuration software, very similar to a kitchen planner at Ikea. However, such a static image hardly gives any insight into the material flow and performance of the factory.
With its Industrial Assets tool, Prespective offers you a solution to quickly visualize your production line and product flows. Using the powerful Unity engine, it enables you to create a real-time 3D representation of your system and add movements and behavior to your static engineering models. Because of the open character of our software, connecting outside data sources and visualizing them in your 3D environment is straightforward.
Calculate and visualize throughput and export the results. The combination of real time data visualization and realistic CAD data in a 3D environment gives valuable insight into the system and its performance, creating common ground on which all stakeholders can base their decisions.
How does it work?
Prespective develops and delivers digital twin software. Digital twinning is the modern way of virtual prototyping. It’s a new layer on top of your existing models, vastly extending your simulation possibilities. Estimated from real-life experiences, you can develop 25 percent faster with real-time simulation software like Prespective, all with less cost, fewer mistakes, smaller teams, fewer physical prototypes and fewer issues after commissioning.
Although the benefits of a digital twin are evidently numerous, creating such a virtual copy can be a strenuous job, especially for untrained engineers. It will take hands-on experience on how to perform all necessary actions, and engineers will need time to get the details straight and familiarize themselves with all the intricacies.
With Prespective, we have lowered that threshold. You no longer have to extensively define all the components of your system, which can be a cumbersome, time-consuming exercise.
Without coding, you can now simply select predefined assets and objects from a customized, white-labelled library and quickly create a 3D visualization of what the factory will look like and how the process will perform. The product flow is easily adjustable since you can drag assets out of the configuration and drop new ones in. You will immediately see the impact and consequences of that change. Also, you can export the results to, for instance, Excel for further management analysis.
The assets in the library are by no means static components; they move and behave according to a set of adjustable parameters, such as the speed of a belt or the length of a robot arm. Those parameters can be modified to find the optimal settings and to reach the highest throughput for the production line. All objects make use of our Discrete Event Simulation tool that will help to minimize the necessary calculation power.
The fact that assets and components are dynamic parts of the factory planner makes Prespective stand out in comparison to other configurators and alternative solutions. When a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how much you can say with a moving, interactive and real-time 3D visualization! That unique feature makes the tool very useful during the engineering phase when representatives from different technical disciplines can use it as a central model to discuss, avoiding miscommunications and eliminating 40-80 percent of human errors.
Prespective might even have more added value in the technical sales process. Imagine how potential clients will react when you can show them, live during a meeting, how the factory configuration will take shape. You can even prepare some alternative setups and discuss which would work best for them. The best part is that changes can be made on the spot, immediately showing the advantages and disadvantages of that modification. What is the effect on the throughput? And how will it affect the bill of materials and the total cost of ownership? Because you will be able to give that feedback instantaneously, you have proof that you can actually deliver what you claim, quickly gaining the trust of your clients. Prespective is a true sales accelerator. You can reduce the order lead time by as much as 50 percent. Moreover, the Unity platform allows a faster than real-time simulation (up to 100x), so you can swiftly get a feel of the system performance.
Truth be told, the data about the throughput and TCO are approximations, since they are based on the parameters of your virtual assets. A different belt speed could directly influence the outcome. So the better you set the parameters, the more accurate the results will be. When you would build a complete, detailed digital twin of your system, the outcome will be spot on. In Prespective, you are working with predefined building blocks. Think: Legos. The final design will never perfectly resemble reality, but you can get tremendously close. So close in fact, that the results from Prespective will give you extremely reliable estimations of the system’s final performance, which are most certainly sufficient as a base for your design decisions or quotations.
Prespective allows you to visualize the timing in your production process. This means that potential bottlenecks will automatically pop up, since you will see buffers fill up, or even flow over. By adding another virtual human worker or an extra AGV to your setup, you might be able to solve this issue directly. In our tool, you can even determine the size of the buffer. If the KPI of a client is that no buffer may exceed, for instance, seven items, you can enter this value into the model settings and let the simulation trigger an alarm when that number is reached.
The tool is based on the Unity platform that highly values openness. This means that you can run Prespective on a variety of platforms, including iPads and even Virtual Reality environments. Moreover, you can pass on the preferred configuration to a client as an executable, that they can show to other experts in the organization, without the need for a special license. Because of the openness, with only a little coding, you can adjust the assets in your library, much further than simply the basic parameters.
Prespective offers you the service to work together on setting up your own private library, with all assets tailored to your needs and with your own user interface. We can assist you in tweaking the already available standard building blocks and extend them with your business intelligence, because the TCO analysis is only valid if the right costs of all assets are accurately known. Also, we can help you create completely new building blocks for assets that are unique to your company.
Contact our team of Digital Twin experts to discuss your challenges or vision and how we might be able to help.
