On the 8th and9th of September, Hankook Delcam had its annual User Group Conference atSINTEX/La Vie D'or Resort in Hwaseong-si, Gyeonggi-do. Since it is the biggestevent for their customers, Autodesk executives attended it from oversea, and introducedAutodesk’s products, and business strategy. Vice President Pete Baxter, SrDirector Bart Simpson, and APAC Director of Sales Koji Tsujino shared theirinsights about smart manufacturing and the user group conference during theinterview with Handler.

▲ Autodesk VicePresident Pete Baxter(right), Sr Director BartSimpson(second from left), APAC Director of Sales Koji Tsujino(left)

What are the Autodesk’sstrategies for smart manufacturing trend?

During the presentation, I talked about big changes in themarket. The really big changes we see are that organizations have a choice.They can just focus on reducing the costs, but that’s the strategy that overtime they compete against each other, and push the costs down and down. Whatreally smart manufacturing is about using new technology to enable to add more value.What you are trying to do to add more value is providing things which is morevaluable to the customer than what they have today. One of the classic exampleis customizing the product to ensure that the product most closely matches whatthe customer needs. In the same way we will know that we will pay more moneyfor a car which is configured to exactly the way we want. Old manufacturers arepushing down this particular line, but to enable them to customize products,they have many more challenges in both designing and delivering products. Itmeans that they need to have more people involved, more complex design andmanufacturing processes, and they have to manage the information. They need totake advantage of those new manufacturing techniques that are available tothem, so it is no longer purely about subtractive machining processes,combining additive and subtractive, combining robotics, combining with datathat we get from sensors in our factories which can make our factories more flexible.Therefore, we have got more variations in the products which are needed to havefaster and more complex manufacturing processes. On top of that, we have gotthis opportunity to bring together both physical products and the digitalelement. The products which we would have thought of being dumb a few years agoare all intelligent products today. The classic example is the washing machine connectedto the Internet. All of these are about providing more capabilities tocustomers. Both in terms of products that are customized to produce in thefactories but it is also the same about the machines in that factories. In thesame way, we need to produce products which are connected for our customers.Within the factory, we use machines which are connected, so our customers want tocapture information about how the machines are used, and to understand how theycan use that to inform the decisions they make.

How do you collaborate withHankook Delcam Ltd. in terms of “The future of making things”, which Autodeskis focusing on now?

What Hankook Delcam is delivering to customers is thecombination of technical products and the knowledge and the expertise on howthe products are used. It means is that they have to be very close to thecustomers to understand both what the customers try to do today, and what thecustomers want to do tomorrow. Where we work closely with Hankook Delcam is toinform the decisions we make about products. The value that Hankook Delcamprovides their customers and Autodesk is their manufacturing expertise to helpinform where we take the products. By being close to their customers enablesthem to provide much more valuable input to us to deliver on the nextgeneration products. The other aspect of that is with all of resellers andpartners they develop additional technology to enhance the process and bettersupport local markets. AIMS which you heard about today is the classic exampleof additional automation which Hankook Delcam has built on top of Autodesk’stechnology which enables them to meet the specific needs of groups of customersin these markets. Overtime we are rebuilding all of the products andcapabilities within Autodesk into a series of web services specifically to makeit easier for organizations to enable them to build their own small factories.

▲ Autodesk SrDirector Bart Simpson is giving a speech on “Smart Manufacturing Overview” inthe 28th Hankook Delcam User Group Conference.

What can Autodesk provideHankook Delcam Ltd. CADCAM users to improve productivity and increase sales intheir fields?

We can talk about some of things which has been different sinceAutodesk acquired Hankook Delcam. Hankook Delcam has had a lot of technologyfor driving machine tools, such as machining software for measuring things onmachines tools. What Autodesk has had is fabulous technology such as simulating,designing tooling, and additive manufacturing technology. For any manufacturingcompany, they need pieces of technology working together to provide them with realbenefits. With billions dollars of investment which Autodesk has made, the keything that we have today is putting together all of these various technologyand developing capabilities to automate the workflow between those products.

Last August, Autodesk launchedgenerative design feature which is a part of Netfabb software. Could you tellme the importance of this feature?

Generative design is a massive change. Previously, affectively,designers had the ideas what they wanted to achieve, and then they had to comeup with the design which would enable them to achieve what they wanted. The bigchange in what a designer is doing is just telling the computer software whathe or she wants to achieve, and the computer software is coming up withdifferent solutions. Today, we saw the example from Stanley Black & Decker.That is clear on the design side how the system is coming up with a lot ofdifferent designs. In addition, there is no reason that we cannot use similar processeswe think about how we would manufacture that. Because we do the same thing withmanufacturing. We know what we want to make, but the manufacturing engineers haveto think about how we make it. However, clearly, generative design has anopportunity not only to help the design parts, but also to design manufacturingprocesses or the way the machines move to make parts. Generative design has thepotential to impact every single step in the process. Also, generative designrequires to have a lot of processing capability, because we are usingsimulation technology to understand what these different designs would give us.As we have moved to cloud computing with its virtually infinite amount ofcomputing capacity, generative design comes to its own. You couldn’t do it ifyou just used a desktop PC.

What is your impression aboutthis year’s Hankook Delcam Ltd. User Group Conference?

It is a fabulous event. You see the talents within HankookDelcam when you see both the customers and the big team of the engineers in thebeginning of the event. I believe that the expectation from the next generationof the customers, and the capabilities of the next generation of the engineersare the most exciting thing for the Korean market. Hankook Delcam customers andthe team are young, motivated, and intelligent. That is a great foundation forthe future for the organization, customers, and country.