The past few years have posed incredible challenges for manufacturers. Unpredictable demand, unexpected production starts and stops, and unreliable supply chains have prompted many to look for opportunities to become more adaptable.

Technology advances are now making it much easier to digitize. This creates new ways to connect processes in the factory through process management and automation. With digitization, manufacturers can better tackle today’s challenges while unlocking massive value through convergence of the physical and digital worlds.

Learn more about the digital factory and connected data for manufacturing

Autodesk is committed to enabling the full gamut of smart manufacturing, giving our customers the ability to work in entirely new and more productive ways. A critical piece of that puzzle is bringing digitization and connectivity to the shop floor, with data at the center. This will help manufacturers to transform their factories and set up a truly collaborative end-to-end, design-to-make workflow.

New investments help connect the factory

As we strive toward delivering on that full vision, we’ve completed the acquisition of Prodsmart, a maker of software for optimizing manufacturing processes with automation and digitization from the shop floor upward. Prodsmart technology provides a real-time system of record for data collection, management, and analysis. It gives production managers insights from order all the way through to shipping.

We also recently acquired the IP assets of CIMCO, best known for its industry-leading machine communication software and G-Code visualization. We’re particularly excited about what CIMCO was quietly working on the past few years. They’ve developed technology that automates the process of defining machine strategies and provides a browser-based experience. This allows machinists to better connect to the rest of the product development lifecycle.

These acquisitions build upon the cloud-native PLM capabilities we added last year with Upchain. By surfacing and connecting project data from across the design-to-make software environment, Upchain increases efficiency and resiliency while removing barriers to collaboration.

These new Autodesk assets are already transforming what we’re able to deliver in Fusion 360 while accelerating our efforts to reach out onto the shop floor with tools that streamline factory workflows and lead to operational and financial gains for manufacturers. We’ll continue to build on our momentum in this space because we know how important the connected factory is to the future success of our customers and the manufacturing industry at large.