PTC has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Arena Solutions Inc., a leading software as a service (SaaS) product lifecycle management (PLM) platform
provider. The acquisition will further PTC’s strategy to be the leader in the rapidly growing market for SaaS-based product development software, enabling the company to deliver a complete CAD + PLM SaaS solution. Under the terms of the agreement, PTC will acquire Arena Solutions for $715 million in cash. Subject to customary closing conditions and completion of regulatory review, the acquisition is expected to be completed in PTC’s fiscal Q2 2021.
"A year ago, PTC entered the SaaS world for product development software with our acquisition of Onshape,” says Jim Heppelmann, president and CEO, PTC. “That move reflected our strong conviction that our market is nearing a tipping point in its willingness to adopt SaaS technology, following the trend seen in many other software markets. The effects of COVID-19 have dramatically accelerated this inevitable shift, with PTC customer surveys indicating a 25% increase in readiness for SaaS PLM since the pandemic started. We expect the acquisition of Arena will significantly extend our leadership position as we continue to redefine the future of our industry.”
With headquarters in Foster City, California, Arena Solutions serves more than 1,200 customers across the electronics, high-tech, and medical-device industries, including world-class innovators such as Nutanix, Peloton, Sonos, and Square. In addition, Arena will broadly extend PTC’s presence in the attractive mid-market, where SaaS solutions are becoming the standard.
“As the SaaS PLM pioneer, we were first to see that engineers and product developers would benefit from a new paradigm in the way they collaborate and drive product innovation,” says Craig Livingston, Arena Solutions president and CEO. “We were ahead of the market in the early days, but in the past several years we’ve seen an acceleration of market receptivity and demand. This acquisition validates our original vision, and we are pleased to be joining an
established leader in CAD and PLM capable of hastening the movement of our market to SaaS.”
The Arena Solutions product realization platform unifies PLM, quality management, and requirements management, allowing every participant throughout the product design and manufacturing process – as well as across an extended supply chain – to work together in a secure, high availability cloud environment.
“This acquisition is the logical next step in PTC’s strategy to be the industrial SaaS leader,” Heppelmann continue. “A big first step was the acquisition of Onshape, the SaaS leader in CAD and collaborative design capabilities. Arena will enable us to round out the solution with full PLM capabilities and deliver the only complete CAD + PLM SaaS solution in the industry.”
Tesla hits 2020 sales target, more or less
499,550 deliveries falls slightly short of 500,000-vehicle target but automaker reaches production goals.
Palo Alto, California – Rounding up, it was close enough.
Electric vehicle (EV) company Tesla delivered nearly 500,000 vehicles last year (450 short of the target), pretty much meeting a goal that seemed unrealistically optimistic when COVID-19 shut down factories and decimated auto sales during the year.
The 36% sales increase came as Tesla’s conventional vehicle competitors posted double digit declines for the year (more on that once all automakers have reported 2020 sales), with most down about 12%.
In late 2019, Tesla worked out most of the glitches it had encountered in the launch of its Model 3, a more affordable hatchback compared to its earlier vehicles. Last year, it launched a new plant in China and the Model Y small crossover. This year, the company hopes to start production of its Cybertruck pickup in Texas, but production isn’t likely to start until late in the fourth quarter at the earliest.
Tesla predicted early in 2020 that it would hit the half-million vehicle mark last year, but months of COVID-19-related shutdowns at its Fremont, California, plant made that look unlikely at mid-year. In October, CEO Elon Musk said in a memo to employees that the company had caught up with those lost sales and that the 500,000-vehicle mark was still possible if workers could improve output. Based on the final numbers, they clearly did so.
Best of 2020: Lordstown Motors pioneering hub motor electric trucks
Higher power and smaller components will allow Lordstown Motors to power its Endurance pickup with hub motors in each wheel, greatly simplifying vehicle build.
Heritage of a very different past flows through every inch of Lordstown Motors’ (LM’s) Ohio plant. The Fanuc welding robots ready to assemble electric pickups have spark scars from the Chevy Cruze models assembled there less than two years ago. Signs in the parking lot point to special spaces reserved for electric vehicles (EVs) – Chevy Volt EVs, that is. Employees’ shirts may sport Lordstown’s lightning bolt logo, but signs at the work stations have GM and Chevrolet logos.
Yet the 54-year-old auto plant that GM sold to LM last year also promises to push EVs in a new direction that could radically change the cost and complexity of vehicles in the future.
“There’s a simplicity to this vehicle that we don’t think anyone’s going to be able to match,” LM CEO Steve Burns says. “Four moving parts in the drivetrain, the four wheels. That’s it. There’s not a gear on this vehicle; there’s not a U-joint; there’s not a differential; there’s not a driveshaft or a drive axle.”
When it launches next year, Lordstown’s Endurance EV pickup will use electric hub motors in each wheel instead of following the traditional EV layout of a large electric motor with a transmission that sends power to the wheels.
It’s an idea that’s been around for decades, and Burns says the technology is finally ready.
Copper-colored hubcaps on the Lordstown Motors Endurance electric pickup look like electric motor windings from a distance. Executives say the color draws attention to the motors in the wheels that power the truck.
Simplified design
As Burns notes, the appeal of hub motors lies in what they shed – most notably the entire power transmission system. The four independent motors only need to connect to the rest of the vehicle through electrical and data lines. Rotating drive shafts, often exposed to elements, aren’t needed, lowering vehicle weight and parts costs. The underside of the vehicle – absent shafts, tailpipes, axles, and a differential – becomes a nearly flat plane, giving designers more ground clearance and freedom to design enclosures for battery packs.
Lordstown is targeting the commercial pickup fleet market – vehicles used by utility companies for service calls, or by plumbers, electricians, or landscaping companies. Burns says those companies can benefit from EVs because electricity is generally a cheaper way to power vehicles than gasoline or diesel, adding that the hub motors will make his truck uniquely well suited to fleet users.
With no engine up front and no transmission sending power down the middle of the pickup to the rear wheels, the Endurance gains dozens of cubic feet of space for batteries, storage, and safety crumple zones to absorb crash energy in an accident.
“We’re going to try to utilize all that space,” Burns says. “We can offer extra storage space, better seating arrangements. We’ll have room for bigger batteries, not just for vehicle range but as a power take-off for people’s tools. You won’t need a Honda generator in the back of the truck.”
The promise of eliminating dozens of heavy, expensive parts and gaining more space has attracted automakers for more than a century. In 1900, Ferdinand Porsche showed off the Lohner-Porsche Electromobile in Paris, a hub-motor-powered EV reaching up to 23mph. Throughout the past decade, most automakers have shown concept cars powered by hub motors or have discussed using in-wheel power to add all-wheel drive to front-wheel drive or rear-wheel drive vehicles.
Challenges to adoption
Yet, despite enthusiasm and more than a century of research, hub motors have never made it into production cars and trucks. Some wheelchairs use such motors, as do electric bicycles and a handful of golf carts.
Three electric motors experts, when asked about the challenges of hub motors, all listed the same concern first – unsprung mass. Each Endurance hub motor weights about 88 lb, and that mass rests below the vehicle’s springs. So-called unsprung mass is harder to isolate from the rest of the vehicle, making it harder to mitigate noise, harshness, and vibration (NVH). Put simply, adding several hundreds of pounds of weight to the vehicles could make the trucks really bumpy.
James Kirtley, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Research Laboratory of Electronics says other big challenges include:
Exposure – In traditional cars and most EVs, designers isolate the engine or motor from the abuse of the outside world, keeping water and dirt away and lowering vibration with shock-absorbing engine mounts. Hub motors will experience every pothole and puddle, and the only thing protecting them will be the air in the tires.
Systems integration – Hub-motor-powered EVs will still need traditional friction brakes, and coordinating those with regenerative braking systems in the hub motors will be difficult, especially given the limited real estate inside the wheel.
Ian Brown, an electrical engineering professor at Illinois Tech in Chicago who also listed unsprung mass as his top concern, adds that many high-powered electric motors now use liquid cooling systems, so hub motors will still need fluid lines and pumps.
“Hub motors, though, do give some potential advantages in terms of torque and torque vectoring control,” Brown says (more on that later).
And all of the experts mentioned costs – four smaller motors cost more than one big one. However, they all agreed that eliminating dozens of other components and systems will likely lower vehicle costs in other ways.
Solving problems
Burns says his engineers have spent a lot of time on handling, and prototype Endurance models have performed well on test tracks. One advantage that commercial pickups have is easy competition. Traditional commercial trucks already ride pretty rough, especially when empty. Without cargo weight to balance the engine’s weight with the rear wheels, pickups can bounce around quite a bit. With EVs, the massive battery pack balances weight better, and Burns adds that the heavy wheels further improve weight distribution.
As to durability, Burns acknowledges that moving propulsion outside of the protected engine compartment is risky, but LM addresses that with tough safety cages around the wheel hubs and has tested those extensively.
“You’ve got to make the physical motor tough enough, and that we’ve proven out on the road and in the lab,” Burns says. He adds that LM also needed to keep the vehicle as light as possible because weight kills range in EVs, so protecting the motors requires expensive, lightweight materials.
Hub motors placed inside of vehicle wheels eliminate dozens of moving parts that contribute to vehicle weight and complexity.
Potential
The launch version of the Endurance is keeping things fairly simple, Burns says. The advantages the truck will bring to market are cost (the Endurance will cost about the same as a Ford F-150 but will have lower operating costs because volts are cheaper than gas) and storage capabilities.
Longer term, however, using four independent motors could open some fascinating abilities in steering and control, the most promising being the torque vectoring idea that Brown mentioned earlier.
Vehicle wheels need to spin at opposite speeds in everyday driving. When you take a left turn, the wheels on the right side of the car travel further than the ones on the left. If the wheels spin at the same speed, the outside wheels will get pulled along the arc, skipping and jumping like a shopping cart or wagon. Traditional cars handle this with a differential, a mechanical system that effectively spins the outside wheels faster than the inside ones. Hub motors would allow far more sophisticated ways for managing spin, making it possible to take corners faster with more confidence.
Theoretically, a hub-motor-powered car could ditch the steering system entirely, handling direction changes entirely with wheel speeds. Imagine vehicles such as tanks and skid-steers that can spin in place by turning the left track in the opposite direction of the right one.
Elaphe Propulsion Systems’ L1500 in-wheel hub motors power the Lordstown Motors Endurance.
Photos courtesy of Elaphe
Burns says such ideas will have to wait until second- or third-generation versions of hub-motor-powered EVs. For now, the focus is getting the first model on the road. LM already has pre-orders for a year’s worth of production at the Ohio plant from fleet customers. The biggest short-term challenge is staffing the plant and getting equipment in place during the pandemic.
“We’re convinced that the time is right for these. The idea’s been around a long time, but the technology is ready. The engineering man-hours in the last hundred years that have gone into trucks, it’s got to be the most engineered things humans have ever made,” Burns concludes. “When I say our version 1.0 vehicle is going to be better in some respects, I don’t say that lightly.”
About the author: Robert Schoenberger is editor of Today’s eMobility and Today’s Motor Vehicles. He can be reached at rschoenberger@gie.net or 216.393.0271.
Best of 2020: PRAB fluid recycling systems cut waste, offer quick ROI
Fluid management automation offers quick ROI, increases tool life.
Between the skilled labor shortage and the recent economic turmoil, manufacturers are constantly tasking employees with greater challenges, making it critical to identify opportunities that will allow them to run facilities as efficiently as possible.
Proactively approaching operation improvements can have several long-term benefits, especially during challenging market conditions. One operational improvement to consider is streamlining cutting-fluid management with advanced, automated systems.
These systems continuously remove tramp oils and suspended solids from contaminated cutting fluid, control bacteria, and can adjust fluid concentration, enabling the fluid to be recovered and returned to service.
Advanced automated fluid management systems minimize operator intervention, yield lower annual fluid replacement costs and haul-away expenses, and extend tool life – all while improving part quality and maximizing uptime.
Centralized systems for recycling used cutting fluid can reduce fluid waste up to 90%, lower new fluid purchase costs up to 75%, and extend tool life up to 25%. In addition, automation during the process minimizes manual intervention and allows the workforce to focus on other tasks.
Minimize operator intervention
Even before the 2020 economic downturn, multiple studies showed the skills gap could cause an estimated 2.5 million manufacturing jobs to go unfilled. Considering ongoing operational challenges, facilities must also rethink work cell layouts to ensure fewer people are concentrated in a particular workspace. This highlights the importance of finding opportunities in which automation makes practical and financial sense.
Turnkey recycling systems, such as PRAB’s Guardian, are easy to operate and require minimal operator involvement and training. Systems constantly work and feed uncontaminated cutting fluid onto tools, allowing existing personnel to allocate attention to other tasks.
A new option, automatic coolant concentration control, uses an economical in-line process refractometer. Instead of interrupting the process, the system’s embedded processor tests for Brix continuously. Such systems control concentration ratio to ±1%. When the levels drop below the required ratio, the system adds more chemicals and less water to bring the level back up and vice-versa.
Systems such as Guardian also provide a healthier work environment for employees by reducing sump maintenance and removing tramp oils and suspended solids from contaminated cutting fluid, limiting exposure to lubricants that could potentially cause health problems and lead to medical claims.
Lower fluid replacement, haul-away costs
Labor-focused efficiencies are only part of why automated fluid filtration systems typically have a return on investment (ROI) within nine months. Advanced systems can significantly lower fluid costs and haul-away expenses while maintaining higher quality cutting fluid for a longer period – extending the life of the cutting fluid 2x-to-5x.
Valuable options for these recycling systems include coolant managers – ozone injection modules prevent rancidity, a major cause of cutting-fluid failure. This bacteria-control system eliminates the need for biocide and is a safe, economical way to kill bacteria, yeast, fungus, and mold. In addition, foul odors and skin irritations decline.
One manufacturer saw a significant decrease in the amount of haul-away waste after installing an advanced recycling system. Their previous recycling system consumed 4 drums (832L) of new cutting fluid oil and disposed of 4,500L every seven-to-eight days. With an advanced system, the company consumes that amount of new cutting fluid every 28 days and disposes of the same amount of waste every 83 days.
By reducing waste fluids up to 90%, costs to haul away hazardous waste can be lowered dramatically and help with the system’s ROI.
Extend tool life, improve part quality
Protecting high-level capital investments can have a direct impact on a manufacturer’s financial health. Cutting tools can account for 3%-to-5% of total manufacturing costs for some operations.
Cutting fluid management is a major driver for extending the longevity of tool life. One worldwide manufacturer of complex metal components experienced dramatic increases in tool life from the automated filtration of its cutting fluid, including:
Drills: 209%
Turning: 78%
Form: 66%
Boring: 47%
Reamers: 26%
Extending cutting tool lifespans and more efficiently using cutting fluid can earn the payback in less than a year.
Conclusion
By investing in back-end equipment, manufacturers can efficiently reallocate labor, often their largest operational expense, more effectively and efficiently. A proactive approach to operational improvements, such as advanced recycling systems, can be especially helpful for shop managers trying to reduce financial strains during difficult market conditions.
Best of 2020: Lessons from 2008 for post-COVID-19 manufacturing
Siemens Vice President of Automotive and Transportation Industry Strategy Nand Kochhar discusses processes, technologies for adapting to pandemic-caused difficulties.
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all parts of vehicle development, manufacturing, and sales. Automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are rethinking how they design, develop, test, build, sell, and service vehicles to protect the health and safety of employees, customers, and communities. Office buildings, factories, testing, certification, and homologation facilities have been closed or reorganized to support physical separation between employees. This creates significant challenges throughout vehicle development and production.
Vehicle designers and engineers are finding ways to maintain collaborative, productive work environments while physically separated. Computer aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE) software is standard across the automotive industry, allowing remote work, but critical junctures in vehicle development continue to rely on manual or interpersonal exchanges of information between engineers. In-person design reviews, for instance, are still common to approve work or direct refinement.
Furthermore, automotive OEMs and suppliers had to take quick, decisive action to adapt production facilities to protect employee health while maintaining as much output as possible. Engineers redistributed production stations across production lines to ensure appropriate social distancing between operators. Shared parts bins and tools had to be eliminated, with operators using their own tools and parts to prevent the spread of the disease via mutual contact with surfaces. Such seemingly small changes can greatly influence how people work, often slowing them down.
OEMs and suppliers have made large strides in adapting to these new methods. Next, they must get back to business in a manner sustainable today, and be stronger and more resilient to tomorrow’s challenges. As companies transition, it will be important to reflect on lessons learned during past crises. Meanwhile, companies should continue to pursue technologies and methodologies of the future to become faster, and more innovative and resilient.
Lessons from 2008
The global pandemic has posed a two-fold challenge. Along with altering vehicle design and manufacturing methods to protect employee safety, it spurred an economic recession due to business closures, unemployment, stagnating commerce, and general uncertainty. Lessons learned during the Great Recession of 2008 can provide a roadmap to recovery. The most critical lesson, and biggest challenge, centers on balancing vehicle production with market demand and available supply throughout the automotive value chain.
Automotive OEMs must carefully manage production rates to meet customer demand and supplier capabilities. Before production can begin to ramp, OEMs must ensure their supply and customer bases can support more new vehicles. Then, as production ramps, OEMs must be careful not to exceed customer demand and flood the market with new vehicles. Likewise, constantly monitoring the supply base will ensure production does not outpace suppliers’ ability to deliver materials and components.
It’s not just the OEMs that must make these decisions. Every stakeholder and supplier throughout the automotive supply chain has to manage output to meet demand from OEMs and their own suppliers. Building an accurate picture of market demand and available supply requires simultaneously monitoring multiple variables at every level of the supply and value chain. It’s incredibly complex.
Therefore, automotive companies must be open, communicative, and collaborative with partners and stakeholders to ensure a successful ramp-up of vehicle production. Consistent communication between OEMs and their supply bases facilitates a constant flow of information on conditions at all supply chain levels. This continuous information flow is critical to balance vehicle production with rapidly changing demand and supply conditions. OEMs and suppliers also must work closely with local, state, and national governments to ensure they continue to conform to regulations and guidelines while preparing for future phases of re-opening.
Ultimately, success of these collaborative efforts relies on the will and ability of the people involved to pull in the same direction. It’s encouraging to see automotive industry members rally together to adapt and find solutions to the difficulties they face. Such peer-to-peer cooperation is vital to the industry’s health.
Emerging technologies
Investing in advanced technologies and manufacturing processes now could spur recovery and make OEMs and suppliers more resilient to future crises. In most cases, these technologies are already in use in limited or experimental capacities. Companies are looking to apply these technologies in new ways to become faster and more agile and resilient.
Automation and robotics have been fixtures of automotive manufacturing for decades. In the past, industrial robotics and automated manufacturing were limited to highly repeatable applications and processes. In the wake of COVID-19, many companies will increase automation use to improve production efficiency and their ability to weather challenging times. Companies will invest in making automation more flexible and autonomous, enabling machines to safely complete or assist human operators with a greater number of tasks.
Additive manufacturing (AM) adoption should also grow. While AM has been in use for several years, its applications have remained limited due to the difficulties of scaling to an industrial level. However, AM provides added agility and flexibility compared to traditional manufacturing methods while also enabling entirely new product geometries that optimize key performance metrics. The speed, flexibility, and nearly boundless design possibilities of AM make it an exciting technology for automotive manufacturers dealing with increased demand for customizable vehicles.
Digitalization empowers industry
While adapting and responding to COVID-19, digitalization has been a powerful facilitator of close collaboration, teamwork, and agility. It supports better decision-making through robust analytics, making it easier for employees to work together across engineering domains, functional teams, and organizations. A robust digital thread allows different teams to easily share information and engineering data in a managed, secure manner. Modern engineering solutions also help engineers work and collaborate remotely. For instance, virtual reality has become a favored method of conducting live design reviews while employees work from home.
As vehicles move from production to utilization, companies with strong digital backbones can continue to support and extend vehicle value. Pushing vehicle software updates to customers remotely allows companies to continue delivering value after the initial vehicle sale and opens up revenue streams.
This level of digitalization – from vehicle development through manufacturing and into vehicle sales and service – is the next step for the automotive industry. As companies respond to and recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, those that commit to a comprehensive digitalization strategy will be best positioned to lead the automotive industry tomorrow.
Posted by Robert Schoenberger
