A Digital Twin for Athletic Apparel Leader
About the Customer
Our customer is an American sneaker manufacturer and one of the most recognized sportswear and athletic equipment brands in the world. As a leader in the Retail, Fashion & Consumer Goods industry, the athletic apparel producer sets a gold standard for its sponsorship of famous athletes, marketing initiatives and brand recognition. With more than 80,000 employees across thousands of worldwide locations, the company is near the top of the Forbes 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations, valued at over 30 billion dollars.
Project Summary
The athletic apparel leader wanted to bring production back home by building their first-ever sneaker manufacturing facility in the United States. To ensure the success of this digitalization initiative, the customer asked Engineering Industries eXcellence’s simulation specialists to create a complete Digital Twin model of their future factory. Using our model, the retail leader could run simulated tests on a variety of production factors, enabling facility optimization, cost-cutting and the mitigation of manufacturing risks before the factory’s first brick was laid.
Project Activities
- Gathered manufacturing data from customer’s global sites to understand production needs for North America.
- Built a custom Digital Twin simulation model leveraging Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation software.
- Enabled risk-free experimentation with different facility layouts, production schedules and manufacturing disruptions.
- Helped customer achieve the optimal factory layout for product quality, cost-savings and manufacturing efficiency.
- Supported customer’s vision for digitalization and design of future factories.
Business Drivers
- Avoid pandemic-related global supply chain disruptions and bottlenecks
- Cut costs for overseas product transportation
- Improve visibility across factory floors and processes
- Optimize throughput and increase efficiency
- Ensure on-time delivery and customer satisfaction for business growth
More About the Project
As a worldwide industry leader, the customer knows that manufacturing is a complex and delicate process that can be influenced by a variety of unpredictable factors. In recent years, the biggest influence on manufacturing across all industries was the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused global supply chain disruptions, increased overseas transportation costs and delayed delivery of products. Another challenge that the customer wanted to address was the lack of visibility into production performance, which was a result of all their current manufacturing operations being executed by third-party contractors overseas. By establishing a flagship manufacturing plant in the United States, the sportswear brand aimed to reduce the negative effects of the pandemic for North American customers, increase oversight of their production processes and gain a better understanding of their manufacturing performance.
Using manufacturing data provided by the customer, our Simulation & Decision Science specialists delivered a Digital Twin model of the future factory to the customer’s leadership team. The Digital Twin model was built using Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation, a highly configurable simulation software that allowed the customer to run experiments with different facility layouts, production schedules and manufacturing disruptions to see how each factor affected the facility’s output and the customer’s business drivers. Our simulation experts assisted in running these experiments, helping the customer to achieve the optimal factory layout for product quality, cost-savings and manufacturing efficiency. Once the simulation model was built, presented to the leadership team and approved, the customer was able to break ground on their new sneaker factory.
Engineering’s Advantage
Manufacturing Simulation projects often involve the creation of a Digital Twin for established factories, but it is a much rarer and more difficult task to create an accurate simulation model of a facility that is yet to exist. The customer chose our Industries eXcellence specialists because they knew we could rise to the challenge. Our experts possess deep knowledge of different simulation technologies and industry-specific manufacturing processes. They also have the implementation expertise needed to deliver even the most highly complex data-driven projects. Our team will continue supporting the sports brand titan as they establish their manufacturing presence in the United States and achieve operational excellence leveraging the power of the Digital Twin.
