Industrial machinery and heavy equipment — special-purpose machines, robotic cells, packaging lines, material-handling systems — sit at the intersection of mechanical design, controls, and manufacturing know-how. DDSPLM, a Siemens Gold Partner and Smart Expert Partner, equips these teams with the Siemens NX, Simcenter and Altair simulation portfolio — so a machine is validated for structure, motion and throughput before steel is cut.
What’s changing on the shop floor
- Machines are becoming mechatronic products. Mechanical, electrical and software design have to converge, and controls logic gets validated before steel is cut.
- Virtual commissioning is going mainstream. Simulating the machine and its PLC together cuts weeks of on-site debugging to days.
- Configure-to-order is a data problem. Winning more bids means more variants — and that pressure lands squarely on PLM, not CAD.
- Energy and uptime guarantees. Customers increasingly buy on throughput and availability, which pushes simulation upstream into the proposal.
The stack we deploy
- NX CAD for primary mechanical design, with strong sheet-metal, weldment and large-assembly workflows.
- Mechatronics Concept Designer for kinematics, virtual commissioning, and controls validation before steel is cut.
- Simcenter and FEA for stress, fatigue, and dynamic loading on critical structural elements.
- Altair HyperWorks for structural optimisation and lightweighting of frames, booms and load-bearing structures.
- Tecnomatix for production-line layout, plant simulation and throughput analysis.
Where we add the most value
The hard part of a special-purpose machine is proving it works — structurally, dynamically, and at rated throughput — before it’s built and shipped to a customer site. We help machinery teams move that proof upstream: FEA and Simcenter on the load-bearing structure, Altair optimisation to take weight and cost out of frames and booms, and Tecnomatix plant simulation to validate line throughput before commissioning. That’s where our engineering team — not just the licence — makes the difference.