Technology giant Siemens is expanding its two-year partnership with software provider Bentley Systems to create full digital twins for building projects.
The companies’ joint innovation investment programme will be increased from the initial €50m (£45m) funding to €100m (£91m), and takes Siemens’ stake in Bentley Systems to over 9%.
Klaus Helmrich, member of the managing board of Siemens AG, said: “I’m very pleased with how strongly our alliance has started. Now we are investing in the next collaboration level with Bentley, where we will strengthen their engineering and project management tools with Siemens’ enterprise-wide collaboration platform Teamcenter to create a full digital twin for the engineering and construction world.”
He added: “Integrated company-wide data handling and IoT connectivity via MindSphere will enable our mutual customers to benefit from the holistic digital twins.”
Greg Bentley, Bentley Systems CEO, said: “As our new jointly offered products and cloud services now come to market, we are enthusiastically prioritising further digital co-ventures.”
One of the first fruits of the strengthened alliance will be an integrated solution for delivering capital projects more efficiently, combining the Teamcenter portfolio with Bentley’s ProjectWise and its connected data environment (CDE), which will be available in early 2019.
Teamcenter claims to be the world’s most widely used product lifecycle management (PLM) system, and ProjectWise is the project delivery collaboration platform for 43 of Engineering News Record’s global Top 50 design firms.
Bentley said: “In going digital, the work of engineers and constructors is increasingly about the digital context and digital components around, and within, their infrastructure projects. As we industrialise project delivery, it is exciting for us to be working with Siemens to extend the reach of our CDE’s digital workflows beyond individual capital projects.
“With the Teamcenter PLM integration, the connections of project digital twins can now both expand into their enterprise context, and drill down into their manufactured components – advancing infrastructure through digital DNA.”
Project digital twins automate digital alignment and change synchronization across the project supply chain, enabling continuous and comprehensive status reviews. Digitalising a plant from the beginning of a project enables the aggregation and dissemination of data in a scalable and manageable fashion.
By connecting digital twins with a consistent digital thread, companies can reduce project delivery costs and avoid cost overruns, and can improve operational margins by increasing plant productivity and reducing operational overhead.
“Owner/operators and engineering, procurement and construction firms in the industry need to lower costs and deliver projects more efficiently, and this new digital solution facilitates data-driven business processes for the optimisation of projects and the plant,” said Tony Hemmelgarn, CEO of Siemens PLM Software. “Powered by the digital twin, this solution allows engineering data to flow between capital project stakeholders, and will support a broad set of industry use cases.”
