Introducing HxGN SDx2: Riches of Data for Projects & Assets

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Adam Goldfarb

Are you an optimist? Sometimes it’s difficult to be in the world of industrial assets, where there have never been more challenges. Whether you’re seeking everything required to plan, design and build new facilities or operate, maintain and secure existing ones, the accompanying complexities are massive.

Challenges for Industrial Facilities

Hand in hand with complexity comes a constant state of change. Even as assets age, the demand for higher production output, cost efficiency and reliability increases. Adapting quickly to changing market forces (e.g., customer demands, competition, underlying technology shifts) is essential.
Regardless of the macroeconomic conditions, your organization must continue to grow revenue and profitability while adapting to the evolving environmental, compliance and safety and governance practices that come with regulation changes. Many asset-intensive industries are also facing shifting demographics as significant portions of their experienced workforce near retirement, increasing the risk of losing invaluable expertise and legacy knowledge.

Digitalization is Real

A grim picture? Perhaps. However, as all my fellow optimists still reading know, there’s also much reason for hope! We’re in an amazing age where technologies once only conceptualized are now available and delivering real business value. The status quo of antiquated, manual approaches is falling away in favor of new, automated processes that are enabling boosted efficiency, productivity, quality and safety... the riches gained from unlocked data!

Hexagon’s Asset Lifecycle Intelligence division is focusing on this data promise. But how does the data stop sitting on a shelf – or requiring disproportionate effort to be useful – and become something valuable? We envision infusing a virtual representation of physical assets with real-time and time-series intelligence and context, which automates processes and analytics and continuously decreases the need for human intervention. This is Hexagon’s Smart Digital Reality™ vision.

At the heart of our vision is our recently launched and innovative HxGN SDx2. This cloud-native, multi-tenant, SaaS solution delivers a robust digital backbone for industrial facilities, enhancing their excellence in engineering, operations and maintenance. Recently, our executive team discussed HxGN SDx2 and the value it provides:

Data Drives Performance

The key to HxGN SDx2 is unprecedented accessibility and usability of data. It breaks down siloed information across the asset lifecycle and improves digital (and human) relationships between projects and assets/operations. It forms a ‘digital thread’ of information that grows stronger as more systems connect to it and users leverage its power to better inform their day-to-day decisions and responsibilities.

In the June 2024 IDC report, “The Criticality of Engineering Data in the Operations Digital Thread,” analyst Jonathan Lang states that “the notion of those who plan a system having a separate set of data and systems from those who produce, operate and maintain within those systems is often antiquated and limits the value potential of new technologies.”

That’s why HxGN SDx2 lays a path to a data dividend, where a competitive edge can be gained through strategic data utilization. What does this look like? Here are a few examples:

Integration & Contextualization

Powerful integrations don’t just aggregate information, they identify key relationships, making it faster to find and easier to use. Hexagon has taken a data agnostic perspective, meaning we treat information coming from third parties (e.g. 3D models, operational data) the same as if it originated from Hexagon. This approach ensures our customers can continue to leverage their existing investments. but now with a full perspective on their assets (not just partial).

Data-centric Approach

In this new paradigm, Hexagon has replaced document-based publishing with near real-time sharing of data objects. This eliminates the historical process of “syncing” 3D models over the span of hours (or days). Instead, there's now continuous sharing of design tool data, reducing work cycles and increasing visibility.

Advanced Data Take-on

Leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate tasks (e.g., tag extraction) makes document creation and organization much more efficient while drastically minimizing the typical, laborious manual processes tied to this critical need. Hexagon refers to this process as ‘smartification’ and can additionally auto-tag any visible tag number in reality-capture images, seamlessly linking the information between the image/point cloud and underlying data model.

Visualization & Data Access

All these data features open a door to greater visibility into what is really happening with a project or at a facility. Here are a few ways HxGN SDx2 achieves this:

- - - Single Pane of Glass – A role-based dashboardthat enables access to your critical data in one place, improving the speed of decision making and control throughout the asset lifecycle.
    - Side-by-Side 2D/3D Visualization – Facilitate design and operations and maintenance work process with visual intelligence reporting.
    - ‘Data Tourism' – Traditionally, data access has been provided to only a few select stakeholders. Today, all data consumers throughout an organization – far beyond traditional project and operations teams – can quickly find required information, in context and from across the entire digital thread.

Institutionalized Knowledge

By codifying an organization’s workflows, HxGN SDx2 enables engineering and operations teams to leverage great volumes of structured and unstructured data in context. This ensures valuable information is preserved, continuously enriched and perpetually available for current and new stakeholders. It supports the onboarding of new hires by providing immediate access to critical knowledge and best practices, accelerating their productivity and integration into the team.

Furthermore, HxGN SDx2 equips team members with better information, enabling the modernization of outdated processes and development of new ones to enhance facility performance, quality and efficiency. This digital continuity bridges the skills gap, providing a sustainable answer to workforce attrition and further promoting project and operational excellence.

What does HxGN SDx2 do?

HxGN SDx2 leverages a next-level digital backbone and is cloud-native and multi-tenant. While these features deliver many benefits for scalability, extensibility, security and ease of updates, HxGN SDx2’s true strength lies in each of its ‘solution areas,’ which leverage data via an integrated set of work processes:

Solution Areas

Asset Lifecycle Data & Information Management: Lay the foundation for success with a data-centric approach, consolidating and contextualizing Hexagon and third-party data to ensure it remains current, accurate and available throughout the asset’s lifecycle. 
Asset Modeling & Visualization: Effortlessly build and maintain an evergreen digital twin, ensuring smooth handover between contractors and owner operators. Leverage powerful visual modeling and intelligence reporting to support decision-making across the asset lifecycle. Gain contextual insights across 2D design, 3D models, geospatial information, point clouds and panoramics.  
Engineering Change: Streamlined with a fully integrated work process that efficiently manages all updates and design changes, improving quality and reducing rework. Create, review and approve change requests while identifying potential conflicts and conducting impact analysis. 
Work Packaging: Optimize asset performance with innovative technology solutions. Establish digital binders of asset information to support decision making during the design, build, operate and maintain phases of the asset lifecycle. Create and approve work packages and workflows and markup/annotate drawings and documents as needed. 
Document Management & Document Control: Ensure organized, secure and efficient handling and approval of document workflows for engineering projects and operational use. Control the status and routing of each project document between stakeholders with integrated task handling (e.g., transmittals, submittals, technical queries, change requests, impact analysis, inconsistency checking, redlining, design document markup). 
Design Review & Issue Management: Transform engineering projects with an integrated, shared approach to design review. Reduce review cycles, drive efficiency and improve consistency by centrally managing requested or compliance-driven changes to assign, assess and resolve issues.

Benefits of HxGN SDx2

HxGN SDx2 is built to benefit many types of organizations, including:

1. Enterprises with significant physical operations and industrial assets – such as energy and semiconductor companies and pharmaceutical and process manufacturers that are working to resolve challenges related to aging infrastructure, legacy systems, cybersecurity threats, patchwork data strategies and rising maintenance costs.
2. EPCs, service firms and contractors supporting asset owners – those most challenged to deliver industrial projects profitably, safely, sustainably and on schedule even amid increasing complexities

HxGN SDx2 provides its customer organizations with significant reductions in project cost and schedule. Its real-time data access minimizes search time and directly supports enhanced engineering design quality, safety and operational efficiency. Furthermore, HxGN SDx2 delivers early issue detection which reduces unplanned downtime and maintenance costs.

Journey Ahead & What’s Next

Digital transformation is like a quest to find data riches; and as with any reward of value, there are many organizations already at some point on their journey. That's why HxGN SDx2 is designed to meet customers wherever they are, then help accelerate their trek. Similarly, HxGN SDx2 is on a journey of its own – one to provide even greater value by delivering future, innovative and useful capabilities to our customers via automated “smartphone-style” updates.

We at Hexagon are ready to discuss with you how your organization may benefit by converging these journeys. We also encourage you to watch this space for additional, soon-to-be-released blog posts that will elaborate on the topics/areas we’ve only been able to mention so far.

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