Imagine your team designs an innovative new seat for a car. Everyone is excited about how it will improve driver and passenger experience. But when it is ready to put into production, the mood plummets: the seats won’t fit into the car.  You are left with the choice to redesign the manufacturing or redesign the product.  Whichever you choose, you are losing production time, driving up costs and missing out on selling time in the market.

There is a better way. Manufacturing has two critical phases – planning how to manufacture a product, and then executing that plan. Leading manufacturers are applying immersive virtuality (iV) technologies at both points.

Much has been made of the role of iV in design. But iV also can play a critical role in manufacturing.  It is imperative to know during the design stage how the product will be manufactured…or if it’s even possible.  And since errors made when designing a product can easily be replicated during manufacturing, innovative companies are recognizing that applying iV – with its ability to allow 3D models to be examined at life-size scale – can help problems to be spotted more readily, before production begins.

We invite you to read “Error-Free Manufacturing” in the latest issue of Compass to discover more – including an example from Embraer – about how applying iV technology can impact the manufacturing process by helping to plan and simulate production.  You’ll also learn about the emerging role that augmented reality (AR) is having on the factory floor by drawing data from the manufacturers’ industrial information systems – including PLM – to create a virtual product guide to allow workers to complete tasks with greater speed and accuracy.