Siemens is helping manufacturers accelerate innovation and stay competitive by embracing digitalization through comprehensive digital twins, interoperability, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
In Southeast Asia, product development is becoming increasingly complex, and digitalization is playing a central role in reshaping how it evolves. By integrating advanced software solutions and digital tools, such as comprehensive digital twins, into manufacturing processes, organizations can boost productivity, reduce costs, and enhance competitiveness. This underscores how organizations are adapting, as reflected in the region’s spending on manufacturing software solutions and services, which is projected to rise from US$9.3 billion in 2024 to US$29.5 billion by 2031.
To realize the potential of these investments, companies must adopt a multidisciplinary design and optimization approach powered by a comprehensive digital twin. This will seamlessly integrate mechanical, electronic, electrical, and software design disciplines, enabling organizations to operate more efficiently and compete effectively in today’s challenging market environment.
Breaking down silos through collaboration
Southeast Asia relies on the global supply chain for more than 60% of its imports. This dependence means that companies often manage diverse supply chains with teams distributed across multiple geographies, which can result in silos between mechanical, electrical, electronic, and software design functions. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach supported by digital twin technology helps break down these silos by ensuring all stakeholders have visibility into design and production processes. This fosters more effective collaboration, improves communication, and enables better decision-making for more efficient and optimized designs.
To strengthen supply chain operations, Thanakorn Vegetable Oil Products, a leader in Thailand’s edible oil industry, implemented Siemens’ AX4-based Transportation Management System, a cloud-native platform that delivers end-to-end visibility, real-time shipment tracking, and exception management. This enabled them to streamline collaboration with internal teams and third-party logistics providers, reduce manual processes, and improve synchronization of inbound and outbound operations, overall enhancing customer satisfaction.
This integration represents a key step forward in developing a comprehensive digital twin. Digital twins allow engineers to visualize and collaborate on designs in a 3D environment while simulating product performance early in the development cycle. This capability is critical for managing complex systems, reducing the risk of design errors, and avoiding costly rework. By enabling early validation and cross-functional collaboration, digital twins help organizations deliver higher-quality products faster and at lower cost.
Eliminating silos and fostering collaboration allows product design, simulation, testing, and validation to happen faster and more easily with the comprehensive digital twin. (Image credit: Siemens)
Interoperability as a competitive advantage
Factories across Southeast Asia often juggle legacy systems and modern technologies, making interoperability a top priority. Open platforms like Siemens Xcelerator allow companies to leverage existing IT systems and data from previous releases, ensuring that they can take full advantage of the digital twin approach without having to overhaul their entire infrastructure. Openness of the platform extends to support for various file formats and data standards. This flexibility allows companies to incorporate data from multiple sources, including legacy systems and third-party tools, into their comprehensive digital twin. As a result, companies can achieve a more complete and accurate representation of their products.
Freyabadi Indotama, one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in Indonesia and a trusted supplier across the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and African regions, manages more than 1,500 SKUs ranging from raw materials to finished goods. To address the complexity of its processes, parameters, and the need to adapt quickly to sudden changes, the company required a comprehensive scheduling solution, along with a digital batch record of raw material usage fully integrated with its ERP system. To meet these challenges, Freyabadi adopted Siemens’ Opcenter™ Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software, leveraging its built-in changeover algorithm to minimize changeover time and increase production capacity. In addition, the company implemented the Mendix™ low-code platform to automate data collection during chocolate production, ensuring that information is seamlessly synchronized between Opcenter APS and the ERP system.
Connecting the product lifecycle with digital threads
The comprehensive digital twin is connected via data that threads through numerous processes across multiple systems, providing a connected flow across the lifecycle of a product from design to manufacturing and beyond, consolidating isolated data into collective intelligence for the comprehensive digital twin. By mirroring the physical world in the virtual world with digital threads, engineering teams can predict the performance and optimize their unique product designs reliably and securely. They can automate tasks. They can work with functions that are interconnected, integrated, and linked so they can quickly access, share and manage their program details across the entire product lifecycle. These industry-specific, multi-faceted, and multi-physics digital threads provide a complete end-to-end process in the comprehensive digital twin for a given industry.
The journey toward digitalization is not just about adopting new technologies to build a comprehensive digital twin – it’s about rethinking how teams design, build, and deliver products. By breaking down silos, embracing openness, and connecting data across the product lifecycle, Southeast Asian companies are building a foundation for smarter, faster, and more connected innovation.
