About Siemens
Siemens is a global technology leader in industrial automation, smart infrastructure, and digital industries. With operations in over 190 countries and approximately 300,000 employees, Siemens drives digital transformation across manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and infrastructure sectors.
Client Challenge
Siemens sought to implement digital twin technology across its manufacturing sites to improve operational visibility, enable predictive maintenance, and optimize production processes. The challenge was scaling a successful pilot project — which had demonstrated compelling results at two German facilities — to dozens of manufacturing sites globally while maintaining consistency, performance, and data governance across regions.
Each manufacturing site had its own mix of equipment vintages, sensor types, and operational procedures. Creating accurate digital replicas required harmonizing heterogeneous data sources into a unified model — a challenge that had stalled previous digitalization initiatives.
Solution
Atos designed and deployed a comprehensive digital twin platform built on cloud-native infrastructure. The solution creates real-time virtual replicas of physical manufacturing assets, enabling Siemens engineers to monitor performance, simulate changes, and predict maintenance needs across all connected facilities.
The platform integrates data from thousands of IoT sensors, PLCs, and enterprise systems into a unified data model that provides a complete view of each manufacturing process. AI-powered analytics continuously analyze this data to identify optimization opportunities.
A key innovation was the digital twin template system: Atos created parameterized models for common equipment types that could be rapidly configured for site-specific variations. This reduced the deployment time for a new facility from months to under three weeks, enabling rapid global rollout.
The platform also includes a simulation engine that allows production engineers to test process changes — new materials, different temperatures, altered sequences — in the digital twin before implementing them on the physical line. This "what-if" capability has become a critical tool for continuous improvement.
Business Benefits
The digital twin platform has given Siemens unprecedented operational visibility across its global manufacturing footprint. Plant managers can compare performance metrics across facilities in real-time, identifying best practices at one site and replicating them across the network. The predictive maintenance capabilities have virtually eliminated unexpected equipment failures during production runs.
The simulation capability has also accelerated new product introduction: production engineers can optimize manufacturing processes for new products in the digital environment, reducing physical setup time by up to 50% and minimizing the scrap generated during process tuning.
Why Atos
Atos's combination of IoT integration expertise, cloud-native development capabilities, and deep manufacturing domain knowledge was essential. The team brought experience from previous large-scale industrial digitalization projects and a proven approach to managing the organizational change that accompanies digital twin adoption — ensuring that engineers on the factory floor embraced the new tools rather than resisting them.
Outcomes
- 35% reduction in unplanned downtime through AI-driven predictive maintenance
- 20% improvement in overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)
- Real-time visibility across manufacturing operations worldwide
- Platform scaled to 40+ manufacturing sites within 18 months
- 50% faster new product introduction through digital simulation