It's all about collaboration

On the 27th and 28th of November, Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence invited MTD magazine to the official opening of its new Experience Centre in Holland. Located at the Brainport Industries Campus in the Northwest of Eindhoven, the two-day event was an opportunity to tour the new campus and participate in insightful presentations that demonstrated how Hexagon is driving innovation and, as a result, developing successful industrial partnerships.

Eindhoven is responsible for the Philishave, the automatic gearbox, the cassette tape and the compact disc. To foster this culture of innovation for future generations, the Dutch government funded the Brainport Industries Campus, which broke ground in 2017. At around 100,000sq/m, the innovation centre is virtually fully subscribed, and that is why construction of a 225,000sq/m phase two on the 17-hectare site will commence this year. With dozens of high-tech businesses collaborating at the campus, Hexagon is alongside cutting-edge companies with brands like Siemens and Meta (Facebook), just a few located at the facility.
MTD magazine attended and the itinerary for the innovation extravaganza promised an exciting lineup. The event started with a welcome from Jan Klingen, Vice President EMEA North, and Eric Veurink, Brainport Industries Campus Director, and a facility tour. As expected with a Hexagon LIVE event, the breadth and depth of technology and insights were so expansive that delegates could choose the most relevant content for their business.
Exemplifying this was one of the first panel discussions on the ‘Future of Mobility in Aerospace and Automotive’, hosted by Hexagon Senior Director for Industry Solutions, Johannes Mann, who was joined by speakers Rob van Loon, Additive Manufacturing Manager at KMWE and Thom Grobben, the Vice President of the Technology Hub at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. The discussion flowed through the challenges of accelerating innovation and agility in the automotive sector to deliver the next generation of smart, connected vehicles. This conversation then moved on to the aerospace industry’s challenges in redefining aircraft architecture and propulsion systems to become more sustainable.
Other prominent seminars discussed ‘The challenges in production and collaboration’, ‘Extending asset lifecycles and improving productivity with HxGN EAM’, ‘Surfing the future now’ and ‘Innovation beyond silos: Transforming Manufacturing through connectivity, collaboration, and Cloud/AI’. There was a lot more on show, with panel discussions, presentations, workshops and roundtable debates encompassing every industry sector.
Nowhere was this more prominent than in Morgan Maia’s presentation, the Partnership Manager at Oracle Red Bull Racing. Hexagon has partnered with the F1 team since its inception. Flying in from the F1 Teams’ weekend win in Las Vegas, Morgan discussed how Hexagon supports the team in streamlining performance by ensuring compliance with FIA regulations, precision manufacturing, and ensuring the team ‘gets it right first time’. More than just a soundbite, Mike Hughes, Head of Quality Assurance and Manufacturing Engineering at Oracle Red Bull Racing, qualified the support of Hexagon with a statement: “With Hexagon’s help, we’ve managed to reduce our faults by 50% over the last two years.”
Morgan’s presentation alluded to how Hexagon is involved throughout the process chain, from 3D CAD modelling and CFD simulations in the virtual wind tunnel to simulation and physical wind tunnel testing. With over one million components handled throughout the season, Oracle Red Bull Racing combines exceptional hardware with efficient software and digital twins to deliver rapid inspection rates. The team has four QA departments encompassing mechanical, external, composites, and race support. They all utilise Hexagon tools, from CAM software to 3D scanners, laser trackers, portable measuring arms and CMMs.

The Leica AT960 scanner is a core element of the trackside equipment that improves accuracy and holistic measurement. Its custom orientation enables measurement from different perspectives. For legality checks, Oracle Red Bull Racing uses the AS1 scanner to scan the floor, front, and rear wings to extract key points of the car for performance set-up.
With the arrival of Red Bull’s first road car, the RB17, and the opening of its 5,000sq/ft powertrain manufacturing site in Milton Keynes, Red Bull’s number of components produced is set to expand significantly, as will its relationship with Hexagon.
The F1 car continually undergoes design cycles that follow the same structured path. With up to 100 projects in-cycle at any time, around 1,000 design cycles are completed yearly. It starts with developing a 3D CAD model and the subsequent digital twin, which is the foundation block for everything that comes after. With CFD, prototypes and a whole raft of processes before the team gets to a finished car, Morgan said: “When you work on a car in the factory and then take it to the track, if there is an issue in manufacturing – it’s too late to do anything about it. We must be sure the car is 100% correct before shipping it. That is why we need Hexagon: to ensure that everything leaving the factory is perfect for when it arrives at the track. We have thousands of parts that need to fit together perfectly. We work to the micron. It’s precision you would see in a high-end watch – but not typically in a 5m long vehicle.”
A presentation on Hexagon’s Nexus suite by Stephen Graham, Executive Vice President and GM of Nexus at Hexagon, followed this. Stephen explained: “Nexus is our cloud-based manufacturing platform. We initially conceived it to solve an internal problem. We have acquired over 150 companies in more than 25 years, which has helped us build this portfolio of technologies throughout the product life-cycle. Our challenge is a large portfolio of technology solutions that were never really intended to work together. We wanted to offer our customers a solution to join the dots and bring the next level of value with the technologies all being under one roof. Nexus was conceived to solve this problem of connectivity. As soon as we took the proposition to our customers, we found they had the same problem. Over decades, they had purchased different technologies to solve different problems.”
“Nexus directly solves that problem, and what we have found in the last few months is an ability to connect to different technologies from different vendors - it doesn’t just have to be Hexagon products. Since starting development, we have found that businesses are structured very hierarchically, with different disciplines arranged in different silos. The whole thing is very process-driven, and as we try to push the boundaries of manufacturing, this becomes a barrier to succeeding. The need to drive collaboration horizontally across an organisation is coming to the fore as a challenge that needs to be faced.”
To demonstrate this, Stephen provided a slide show showing a reverse-engineered workflow using 10 products from Hexagon that facilitate different elements of a product’s lifecycle. The demonstration alluded to new cloud-native apps, technologies and solutions connected to products in the portfolio for decades, such as PC-DMIS. Nexus creates an end-to-end solution that connects the dots. Stephen added: “Once these collaborative workflows have been strung together, engineers can work collaboratively. This provides the opportunity to bring automated and AI technologies into the workflow as automated collaborators in the workflow. A great example of this is ProPlanAI, which we just launched. This large NAPA language model provides precise engineering answers for CAM engineers who may be programming CNC machines. It automatically collates data and generates a G-Code to drive machines on the shop floor. This gives engineers superpowers to drive productivity to the next level.”
Hexagon claims that ProPlan AI cuts the time to program machine tools by 75%. The new AI technology enables machine shops to achieve operational excellence at scale, powered by Microsoft Azure services built into Hexagon’s cloud-based Nexus connectivity platform. Available in Q1 2025, ProPlanAI will ‘learn’ from the data created by a company’s CAM programmers. This will enable manufacturers to automatically explore existing programming information to predict ideal outcomes tailored to a company’s preferences, production capabilities, and needs. ProPlanAI will continuously learn and adapt, ensuring programs are as efficient and productive as possible. ProPlanAI can be trained with a company’s institutional knowledge to ensure machines can be quickly and efficiently programmed to their quality standards. Additionally, a Hexagon Copilot provides suggested pathways to advise on best practices without leaving their CAM software.
The innovation has been developed in collaboration with Microsoft, and Ygal Levy, the EMEA Manufacturing Managing Director at Microsoft, discussed the company’s strategic partnership with Hexagon in greater detail during an afternoon presentation on the ‘Transformation of manufacturing through Connectivity, Collaboration and Cloud/AI’.
Clare Barclay, President of Enterprise and Industry at Microsoft EMEA, said: “Microsoft’s collaboration with Hexagon is driven by a shared belief that we can transform manufacturing productivity. It’s rewarding for us to see how the AI capabilities provided by Azure are empowering CNC programmers with productivity-boosting automation while helping new users upskill faster. This is exactly the sort of transformation AI can bring to the industry, and we are excited to see Hexagon apply its manufacturing expertise to transform workplace productivity.”

Verifying the Solution
Just over a year ago, MTD magazine visited RODIN Machining. A few miles north of Amsterdam, the start-up company set out to develop an autonomous factory. Incorporating FASTEMS automation, robot-loaded Mazak machines, and integrated innovations that made the mind boggle, RODIN has been a beta-test customer, putting ProPlanAI through its paces before market introduction. Paul Mooij, Director of Digital at RODIN Machining, said: “Machine tool programming is complicated to automate and requires experience. ProPlanAI is exciting because we can leverage our human capital for greater machine utilisation. Our team can program machines in a fraction of the time by applying their valued skills in supervising ProPlanAI suggestions and finalising the programme specifics.”
 Paul added: “We have built an autonomous factory but are limited by the engineering input we can put into it. This boils down to a race for talent, and we all know it isn’t easy to get good people. We have been working with Hexagon on the development of ProPlanAI, looking at how can we fill it with our data and train it with our models, our machines, tools and our way of working - providing a suggestion of how the model thinks our way of working should be. We can then position our engineer to supervise and undertake ‘prompt engineering’. ProPlanAI is very powerful and provides the right context for the features, model, machines, and tooling available. Using the given context, it then decides, ‘I think you should use these processes for this machining operation’’.”

“This has become powerful, and we are progressing rapidly to make big savings. We are leveraging our human capital to achieve more by using AI to provide suggestions. Then, our engineers decide whether to accept the suggestion and proceed or refine the process. For example, we may have a 2D PDF drawing that needs to meet specific tolerances, and ProPlanAI may not know this – and this is the experience we can add to the system. It’s been a fantastic collaboration, and the system continually evolves.”
Discussing the current situation, Paul told MTD magazine: “Our engineers will consider how they approach a job and create the CAM file in Esprit. We then feed our models to our developers. Over the last 18 months, we have been feeding the data to ProPlan AI, which uses our approach, machining strategies, cutting tools, machines, characteristics and experience. ProPlan AI creates suggestions for the next job and pre-populates our program, so our engineers are validating and refining the suggestions to meet our specifications. It amplifies the output of our staff.”
“For example, if we have an aluminium job that needs a threaded hole with a chamfer, we would have a unique way of doing that with our machines and tools in our CAM files. Based on those patterns, the model learns our strategies and recognises the parameters for a threaded hole in aluminium, the feeds, speeds and so on.”
Looking at benefits during testing, Paul adds: “It is amplifying our output and boosting our efficiency. At present, the savings are impressive. We continuously add data to our ProPlanAI suite, so the savings will cascade into ever greater efficiencies as we progress.”