PART 3: Visualization, Integration, Intelligence: The New Manufacturing Stack

One of the persistent challenges in product development is that engineering data remains locked in formats only specialists can interpret. CAD models, simulation results and manufacturing instructions — they're rich with in sight but inaccessible to marketing, sales, service and executive teams who need to make critical decisions about products.

Last year, we released Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer, a BOM-driven photorealistic visualization tool embedded directly in Teamcenter. It's cloud-based, uses real-time ray tracing powered by Nvidia GPUs and leverages our partnership with Nvidia Omniverse. Instead of relying on local hardware — which creates visualization inequality across an organization — our "rendering-as-a-service" architecture hosted on the secure Siemens Xcelerator cloud provides consistent, powerful visualization for all users regardless of their devices.

Here's what's changed: using natural language, you can simply chat with the system and say, "Show me a cross-section and slide through the vehicle. Show it in a realistic environment and let me walk around it. Add the latest version with white trim so I can compare them side by side. Change to a sunset view gradually as I move."

The amount of manual setup work this used to require was staggering — specialists spending hours or days configuring visualization environments. We're now doing it conversationally, democratizing access to engineering intelligence. When a CFO asks, "Why are we making this design change?" they can see it, understand it, and make informed tradeoffs. That's transformative for organizational alignment.

The Digital Thread in Practice: Rolls-Royce

Rolls-Royce has been a Siemens customer for many years, using our software to manufacture the sophisticated engines they design. Their challenge was typical of heritage industrial companies: document-based systems, some over 50 years old, generating, transforming and consuming data in silos not easily accessible and certainly not integrated.

With Siemens Xcelerator, they're now implementing a comprehensive digital thread. They collect engine test data and performance data from engineering, compare it to the design intent ("as-simulated") and actual production ("as-built"), identify deviations and feed those insights back into product development. They're using Insights Hub, our industrial IoT platform, as a functional data store — bringing together manufacturing data and engineering data in a unified environment.

The results are compelling: Rolls-Royce is using Teamcenter, Opcenter (our manufacturing execution system), Insights Hub, Simcenter (simulation) and Mendix (low-code development) in a single digital thread connecting engineering, functional data and manufacturing data. Performance engineers use this integrated data foundation to make continuous product improvements, turning operational reality into design intelligence.

Rolls-Royce is using Teamcenter, Opcenter (our manufacturing execution system), Insights Hub, Simcenter (simulation) and Mendix (low-code development) in a single digital thread connecting engineering, functional data and manufacturing data.

But here's where it gets interesting. Once you've built that foundation, you can extend it with AI. They've implemented a production copilot that integrates data from PLCs, sensors and edge devices to make sense of error messages and telemetry. When a quality deviation occurs — say, in turbine blade production — you can ask the copilot to summarize the status. It provides a full overview, identifies errors and suggests actions based on maintenance records. You can ask it to guide you through the proposed fix, and it offers step-by-step processes with direct links to maintenance manuals. It can even create maintenance tickets automatically with all relevant details.

This is using RapidMiner with Mendix and embedded AI on top of Insights Hub — creating a customized overall equipment effectiveness application. It's the "adapt and extend" philosophy in action, demonstrating why low-code platforms have become strategic infrastructure.

Low-Code as Strategic Infrastructure

Mendix is coming up in these examples for good reason. For nine consecutive years, Mendix has been named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms.

But awards matter less than the outcomes. General Atomics has built over 20 Mendix applications for employee information tracking, purchasing requests, inventory management and field service. They've replaced approximately 90 legacy systems with Mendix. Bolzoni, a manufacturer of lift truck attachments and material-handling equipment, uses Mendix as integration glue between SAP, Salesforce and Teamcenter — upgrading legacy systems for equipment quality checks, customer service reporting and product delivery. Their new technical documentation portal was developed in one month, whereas the prior system took two years.

BAE Systems has created 40 applications, including part approval and task management, integrating data from SAP, Teamcenter and project management tools. Applications that previously took years now require as little as four weeks. They saved £40 million on one application alone.

It's the ideal combination: low-code's speed and accessibility with AI's transformative potential, all while maintaining the data integrity and governance that enterprises require.

Why does this matter strategically? Because we've embedded AI capabilities directly into Mendix — drag-and-drop AI functionality that allows customers to create AI agents and AI-enabled applications at the right abstraction level. It's the ideal combination: low-code's speed and accessibility with AI's transformative potential, all while maintaining the data integrity and governance that enterprises require.

The final post of this series will address how we’re enabling the AI industry itself with chip-to-grid thinking and solutions, and more.

This four-part series draws on our remarks at the Realize LIVE 2025 events in Detroit and Bengaluru, addressing navigating an era where physical and virtual worlds have become inseparable, and where managing change itself may well be the ultimate competitive advantage. More information on Realize LIVE is available here.