Manufacturing
Siemens Accelerates Product Development and Innovation With Industrial AI
Objective
Siemens Digital Industries Software, a global leader in industrial digitalization, is redefining the future of engineering and manufacturing through a powerful convergence of AI, digital twin technology, and high-performance computing. Across its suite of solutions—from product lifecycle management (PLM) and real-time visualization to advanced simulation and AI assistants—Siemens empowers manufacturers to accelerate product development, optimize operations, and upskill their workforce.
To drive this transformation, Siemens is using NVIDIA technologies across multiple platforms and offerings, including Siemens Teamcenter, Simcenter STAR-CCM+, and the Siemens Industrial Copilot.
Customer
BMW Group
HD Hyundai
Maserti
Partner
Siemens
Use Case
Simulation / Modeling / Design
Products
NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise
NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs
NVIDIA Metropolis
NVIDIA AI Blueprint for Video Search and Summarization
NeMo Retriever
NIM
With NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA Metropolis, and accelerated computing, Siemens delivers:
Increased Product Efficiencies:
- Photorealistic visualization of massive, complex, and feature-rich datasets common in engineering and manufacturing.
- Accelerated product development and review cycles by reducing physical prototypes and eliminating workflow waste and errors.
Better Decision-Making:
- Alignment across global teams, with tracking for feedback and changes within Teamcenter, accelerating design reviews and reducing errors and data discrepancies.
- 50% reduction in time-to-market for marketing materials without the need for separate photo shoots and specialized rendering workflows.
Increased Productivity:
- 30% increase in productivity for workers using a copilot assistant on the shop floor.
- More productive manufacturing plants with reduced downtimes.
Accelerating Innovation and Savings from Product Design to Operations
Manufacturers across industrial sectors, including automotive, aerospace, and marine, face mounting pressure to accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and ensure product quality. Traditional visualization tools struggle to handle massive, complex product datasets, leading to bottlenecks in design reviews, misalignment between teams, and costly physical prototyping. These limitations slow down time-to-market and introduce errors that can ripple through the entire product lifecycle.
Without scalable, high-fidelity visualization, Siemens’ customers relied on fragmented workflows—using separate applications for rendering, collaboration, and data management. This created silos, increased the risk of data discrepancies, and made it difficult to conduct thorough, collaborative design and styling reviews. The inability to visualize products in realistic environments and under varied lighting conditions limited the ability to identify issues early, impacting both functional and aesthetic outcomes. Global manufacturing faces a critical skill and labor shortage, with projections of 85 million vacant positions by 2030. The industry suffers from high worker turnover and workers who lack the skill sets needed in manufacturing environments. Siemens looked at the problem and saw a need for technology that empowers and upskills workers.
Accelerated Product Development With Digital Twins and High-Speed Simulations
Siemens, NVIDIA, and BMW are collaborating to accelerate automotive aerodynamics simulations using advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software and high-performance GPU hardware.
Aerodynamic simulations are essential for optimizing vehicle shape, balancing design and efficiency, and ensuring performance targets are met. BMW runs many aerodynamic simulations daily, each simulating up to 100 million cells (tiny 3D blocks representing air and car surfaces). While CFD software has traditionally run on CPUs, GPU-accelerated simulations offer faster performance at lower costs.
Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+ CFD software now runs natively on both CPUs and GPUs, ensuring consistent results regardless of hardware while enabling GPU acceleration. When running a 458M cell steady state aerodynamics case on the latest NVIDIA B200 GPU node performance is equivalent to over 10000 CPU cores.
Running CFD simulations on GPUs also reduces energy consumption and hardware costs. Further performance gains are possible with newer generation GPUs, including NVIDIA B200 and H200, which feature higher memory bandwidth for faster simulations.
Additionally, the integration of NVIDIA Omniverse™ APIs into Simcenter STAR-CCM+ makes physics-based digital twins more immersive. The integration helps companies design, build, and test next-generation products, manufacturing processes, and factories virtually before physical construction begins. The Omniverse APIs also connect Siemens’ simulation tools to NVIDIA’s generative AI capabilities, allowing engineers to leverage AI within their CFD workflows. This is part of a broader adoption of Omniverse Cloud APIs within the Siemens Xcelerator Platform.
Real-Time Collaboration From Anywhere With Digital Twins
To accelerate innovation and cycle times in product development, Siemens developed the Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer. They integrated NVIDIA Omniverse’s real-time ray tracing and GPU-accelerated rendering directly into Teamcenter, enabling seamless, photorealistic, Bill-of-Materials (BOM) driven visualization of multi-CAD data managed in Teamcenter. This cloud-based rendering as a service is embedded directly within the Teamcenter web client, providing instant, browser-based access to photorealistic digital twins for all users.
Hosted in the secure Siemens Xcelerator Cloud Service environment and powered by a centralized, cloud-based GPU cluster, customers can access Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer’s high-performance visualization capabilities on demand without the burden of managing the hardware and software enabling these capabilities.
Teamcenter’s collaboration tools allow stakeholders to review, annotate, and iterate on designs together in real-time. All feedback and changes are tracked in Teamcenter for full traceability. Users can also validate product appearance in multiple virtual environments, simulate real-world lighting and conduct detailed visual analysis of assemblies, materials, and finishes.
Faster Development, Lower Costs, and Better Outcomes
Siemens customers can visualize and interact with digital twins in real time and at massive scale. Digital twins can support millions of parts with photorealistic accuracy—something previously impossible in a browser-based PLM environment.
These advanced visualization capabilities enable accelerated product development for Siemens customers. Product teams can now seamlessly incorporate real-world product appearances throughout the design process, conduct design and styling reviews in an embedded DMU environment, and generate high-quality marketing visuals directly from Teamcenter, helping customers to reduce development and go-to-market timelines.
Eliminating the need for physical prototypes and separate rendering environments lowers costs for Siemens customers. Both direct costs and operational overhead are significantly reduced. At the same time, collaboration is increased, as all stakeholders—engineering, design, marketing, and sales—can participate in real-time reviews. This ensures alignment and reduces the risk of errors or miscommunication. Early detection of design issues, improved material and lighting analysis, and the ability to simulate real-world environments have led to better-informed decisions and higher-quality products.
Customers report that the Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer has transformed their workflows, enabling faster iteration, more effective collaboration, and a higher degree of confidence in product decisions. The seamless integration with NVIDIA Omniverse technology is cited as a game-changer for industrial-scale visualization.
The platform also excels at remote factory monitoring and optimization, connecting real-time IoT data to their digital twins for live operational insights—a step toward the Siemens Industrial Metaverse vision.
“NVIDIA Omniverse integration enables Siemens to increase product efficiencies and productivity, allowing our customers to save time on product development and design. By approximating real-world behavior in a digital twin, our customers can draw conclusions and optimize product design faster, allowing faster time to market.”
Enzo Krka
Senior Product Manager, Siemens
Industrial Copilot Assistants That Upskill Shop Floor Workers
The Industrial Copilot is an AI assistant that runs on the factory floor to help workers be more efficient, productive and capable. The Copilot integrates with both static information repositories (manuals, maintenance documents) and dynamic data sources (machine controllers, ERP systems), creating a comprehensive knowledge ecosystem. Workers can leverage the Copilot to help optimize production, troubleshoot machine faults and flag manufacturing issues through video feeds.
Workers interact with the Copilot through natural language or speech for ease of use on the shop floor. The Copilot also supports multi-modal inputs including text, images and time-series data. A maintenance engineer confronted with a broken machine could snap a photo of the problematic component, and the Copilot would analyze the image, identify issues like excessive noise levels and offer step-by-step instructions to resolve the issue.
The Siemens Industrial Copilot is deployed on-premises to ensure that sensitive production data never leaves the factory site. Cloud models are replaced with optimized edge versions, small language models (SLMs) are employed for specialized tasks, and NVIDIA NIM microservices optimize inference. By balancing hardware constraints with performance needs, Copilots operate on industrial PCs at the edge running NVIDIA hardware and software.
The Copilot was built with a fusion of the AI Blueprint for video search and summarization (VSS) components like VLMs, LLMs and NeMo microservices. Siemens has reported a 30% increase in productivity, with the potential to reach 50%.
Learn more from Matthias Loskyll, head of virtual control and industrial AI at Siemens Factory Automation, who joined the NVIDIA AI Podcast to discuss how Siemens’ work with NVIDIA is reshaping manufacturing, as the industry hits a turning point.
A New Standard for Efficiency and Innovation
Siemens is redefining engineering and manufacturing by integrating AI, digital twin technology, and high-performance computing. Utilizing NVIDIA technologies across platforms like Siemens Teamcenter, Simcenter STAR-CCM+, and Siemens Industrial Copilot, Siemens empowers manufacturers to accelerate product development, optimize operations, and enhance workforce skills, setting new industry standards for efficiency and innovation.
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