August cover story: New thinking from Hexagon

Hexagon CEO
Hexagon CEO

In 1964, Bob Dylan released his iconic ditty ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ – a song that has become synonymous with the unrelenting tides of change and evolution. Its message rings true in every aspect of life, including business, as Dave Tudor discovered when he visited Las Vegas in June to attend HxGN LIVE – Hexagon’s global technology conference. In the first of a two-part series of articles, he noted a seismic shift away from products and hardware towards the application of technology to bridge the physical and digital worlds. 

In 1964, Bob Dylan released his iconic ditty ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ – a song that has become synonymous with the unrelenting tides of change and evolution. Its message rings true in every aspect of life, including business, as Dave Tudor discovered when he visited Las Vegas in June to attend HxGN LIVE – Hexagon’s global technology conference. In the first of a two-part series of articles, he noted a seismic shift away from products and hardware towards the application of technology to bridge the physical and digital worlds.

HxGN LIVE is a truly colossal annual event that takes place mainly in Las Vegas (six times in the past eight years) and occasionally in Hong Kong and Anaheim, California. The venue for HxGN LIVE 2018 – which ran from 12-15 June – was the equally gargantuan Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas with the same location planned for the 2019 event. Temperatures of 41°C outside were truly energy-sapping; inside, an air conditioning system probably the size of a nuclear power plant made things much more comfortable.

HxGN LIVE is Hexagon’s premier cross-industry technology conference that welcomes literally thousands of Hexagon employees, customers, technical partners, journalists and business leaders from around the world each year. Fundamentally, it’s a networking event on steroids, but it’s much more than that.

The 2018 event featured an exhibition area – The Zone – easily the size of a MACH hall at the NEC – showcasing more than 200 product demos. There was also a comprehensive seminar and training programme running all day, every day totalling more than 500 sessions; and last but by no means least, there were a number of thought provoking keynote speeches from senior management. Around 3,500 people attended HxGN LIVE 2018.

To make the experience altogether more focused, HxGN is sub-divided into ‘tracks’. Hexagon is perceived by many as a leading metrology company – and it is of course – but indicative of its sheer size, there are separate divisions for: Geospatial, Geosystems, Mining, Manufacturing Intelligence, PPM (process, power and marine), and Safety and Infrastructure, Each had its own track at HxGN.

Leap year

Kicking off proceedings in his ‘The Big Leap’ keynote speech, Hexagon president and CEO, Ola Rollén spoke about applying technology to bridge the physical and digital worlds. His keynote set the scene for ‘The Change You Shape,’ the theme of this year’s event.

“Big leaps make great things happen,” he stated, “and historically we only need to look at hugely significant events – such as learning how to make basic tools from iron and metal, the invention of the wheel and printing press, and more recently, the discovery of penicillin – which has saved millions of lives – to see the evidence.

Mr Rollén emphasised the power of a ‘disruptive’ idea: “Anyone in this audience could be sitting on a truly ground-breaking disruptive idea,” he noted. “Disruptive ideas can change the fortunes of companies and organisations and indeed even the very path of mankind.”

He drew an analogy with a modern day phenomenon – home entertainment: “In 1985, Blockbuster opened their first store,” he explained. “For the first time people could choose their sources of Saturday night entertainment by renting a movie from Blockbuster. At its peak, the company owned 9,000 stores, had 60 million customers and rented out nearly 1 billion films a year.

“Then, in 1997, a customer entered a Blockbuster store to rent a movie and was refused because he hadn’t returned his last film. Not only that, he was fined $40 for something that only cost $4 to rent. Naturally disgruntled and upset, he vowed to start his own video rental company. His name was Reed Hastings and that company was Netflix.”

He continued: “As the Internet evolved, so did streaming technology and now Netflix customers can download content direct to their TV or devices. Blockbuster on the other hand went out of business in 2010. 25 years from cradle to grave. Today, Netflix is worth $150 billion. That’s the power of a ‘big leap’.

“The Internet was an avalanche that changed the consumer world and similarly, IoT (Internet of Things) is a force bearing down on all of us that will completely change the way we do business. All industries will need to conform and there will be no safe havens. At the end of the day it’s a straight choice between optimising the status quo – trying to get better at what you’ve always done – or acquiring the mindset to transform. Blockbuster was in the first category and couldn’t survive; Netflix chose the transformation route.”

Pillars of disruption

Ola Rollén referred to what he calls a ‘strategy of disruption’ that can effect significant transformation: “The first part of the strategy is ‘Need’. The need for change is constant because we’re always striving to make things better and better,” he affirmed. “The second part is ‘Ideas’ There will always be ideas and some will develop into things that will really improve our lives.

“But these ideas are based on ‘Pillars of Disruption’. First, as a business, you need to understand what you’re doing – you need ‘Domain Expertise’. You need to understand the industry you want to disrupt. Then you need the ‘Disruptive Force’ itself and finally the ‘Technology’ to make it happen.

“Back to Netflix again; Reed Hastings knew all of Blockbuster’s weaknesses. Blockbuster was in an ‘optimising the status quo’ mindset. They had thousands of stores and employees and huge inventories, yet it all became obsolete almost overnight once internet streaming became possible.

“But for Netflix, the technology still had to work, so that was a vital part of the equation. The third element was the Disruptive Force itself. In this case that was Reed Hastings pushing for the change.

“In our industry however we need to add a fourth pillar – and that’s ‘Data’ because it’s entrenched in everything we do,” he added. “But we have to ensure that that our data and technology are in sync. In this internet age, data creation is huge, but IoT really opens the floodgates because we now have machines producing the data rather than humans – which means information is being generated 24/7. In fact, in the past two years, we’ve produced more data than we’ve ever done throughout the entire history of mankind – and this will only accelerate.

“The challenge is that we’re not totally overwhelmed by this Pandora’s Box,” Mr Rollén warned, “so what we have to do is put a ‘shield’ between ourselves and the data flow, comprising artificial intelligence, Cloud orchestration and Edge Computing.”

As an explanation, Wikipedia defines Edge Computing as pushing the frontier of computing applications, data, and services away from centralised nodes to the logical extremes of a network. It enables analytics and data gathering to occur at the source of the data, transforming it into actionable information.

Of course the bottom line is doing something meaningful with this deluge of data. Ola Rollén believes that to close the loop, machine learning, communication and integration with legacy systems is the logical evolution: “Now the response can be machine to machine,” he declared. The data from one machine is being received, and acted upon by another.”

But what about humans? Mr Rollén believes that people will still be very much in the loop carrying out more advanced data analysis: “There will be less data to process by people but it will be at a deeper level,” he stated. “The data will be more visualised and need to be mobile so it can be received anywhere in the world.”

It’s a wrap

He refers to this infrastructure as an ‘ACE’ (Autonomous Connected Ecosystem) and Hexagon’s new system – unveiled at HxGN – to make this a reality is called Xalt. “Coming full circle, this is Hexagon’s ‘Big Leap’ – this is our commitment to you,” Mr Rollén announced.

“Xalt isn’t a physical entity so you won’t be able to buy it, but its capabilities will be embedded into all our products over time. Over the next four or five years, Xalt will be a complete wraparound technology for all our platforms, systems and products. It’s actually inaccurate to call Xalt a platform – rather it’s a connector of platforms,” he revealed. “The application possibilities are endless – construction, mining, transportation and smart cities where assets are present above and below ground and include utilities such as gas, water and electricity and also the emergency services.

“So fire engines, ambulances and police vehicles trying to weave through busy traffic could be a thing of the past. With everything connected in a smart city, gaps in the traffic could be made autonomously to allow the vehicles through.”

In an ACE manufacturing environment, the applications are equally connected. In a small manufacturing cell comprising a robot, a CMM and a machine tool, the various elements communicate with each other. The CMM ‘tells’ the machine tool that something is moving out of tolerance and that it needs to recalibrate. The machine tool then makes the adjustment autonomously.

“Apply this system across an entire factory and you have a complete Autonomous Connected Ecosystem,” Mr Rollén concludes. “The gap continues to grow between what is technologically possible and what we are doing with that technology. You have the choice to be disrupted or to be the disruptor.”

Part two of Dave Tudor’s HxGN report will appear in the September 2018 issue of PES.

Hexagon www.hexagon.com

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence www.hexagonmi.com

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