Digital engineering and design tools for Industry 4.0

Posted: September 30, 2024

Lessons from the past, looking to the future

How long have you been working professionally? Perhaps you’ve got over 30 years of experience in realizing capital projects, or maybe you’re just beginning your journey straight from higher education. What does design and engineering work look like for you today? The tools you use, the processes, what is something critical you take for granted in your day-to-day that didn’t exist only years before? Imagine a life without email.

When I started my work as a mechanical design engineer out of uni, I was surprised at how pen-to-paper-focused my work and company were. We used digital design tools to build flat representations: lines on a page, rather than a digital model or asset. The work that I’d just been doing at school, while certainly more academic and technical, seemed more focused on utilizing the capacity of digital tools to innovate when compared to my very traditional professional work in the building services industry.

If you were to write down a list of improvements you’d like to see in the way that you work five, ten, even twenty years into the future, what would that look like?

1D, 2D, and 3D engineering and design tools in a single package

No longer a design engineer, I now work in the marketing department at AVEVA, where we are very excited to announce our latest release of AVEVA™ Unified Engineering.

AVEVA Unified Engineering is our answer to the challenge of modernizing traditional industry practices to deliver better, tighter project outcomes through modern digital tools.

AVEVA Unified Engineering brings all 1D, 2D and 3D engineering and design tools into a single package and places the design data centrally in CONNECT, our industrial intelligence platform. All teams work on the same source of data at the same time, which means multidiscipline engineers can coordinate across geographies and even organisations natively and seamlessly. Discipline engineers can log on and begin work while interdependent components of this work are automatically updated from other teams (e.g., mechanical equipment continuously informing power supplies and cabling).

Build a living digital twin for your asset’s lifecycle

AVEVA Unified Engineering comes pre-built with out-of-the-box functionality, bringing fast time to value by allowing teams to deploy globally quickly (with minimal IT burden) in the cloud, ultimately allowing users to get up and running fast. This solution is also offered through our flexible licensing system, allowing teams to dip their toes into digitalization and experience a data-centric environment. 

Rather than creating lines on a page, AVEVA Unified Engineering allows you to build the foundation of your digital twin, a living digital asset for your entire asset’s lifecycle. That means no more reams of documents locked in storage post construction. Existing AVEVA E3D Design users can easily migrate to AVEVA Unified Engineering and experience all the added benefits of an integrated engineering and design solution in CONNECT.

We here at AVEVA are inspired by the amazing things our customers are doing across the globe to drive responsible use of the world’s resources. We are excited for what the future holds as we aim to arm those same customers with the latest in engineering and design tools to create more accurate, more efficient assets.