Siemens and IFS partner on product lifecycle with AI

Siemens and IFS have announced a strategic partnership.

The two companies say they aim to help manufacturers close a persistent gap: the disconnect between how factory operations are designed and how they run in reality, where unplanned downtime, disconnected maintenance schedules, siloed production data and supply chain disruption continue to erode throughput, agility and margin.

Manufacturers are under growing pressure to do more with their existing assets — produce more on the plant floor, protect margins, extend the value of equipment across its full lifecycle and react to change with greater agility and adaptability. Yet many still operate with production, maintenance planning and supply chain management systems that don’t talk to each other, meaning engineering intent, real-world performance and service strategy remain disconnected.

Industrial AI is central to the partnership’s ambition. Siemens and IFS share the belief that the next era of industrial performance will be defined by bringing the physical and digital worlds together to help manufacturers translate design intent into operational reality and connect that operational reality back into better design to accelerate innovation.

Siemens’ digital twin technology brings the engineering, simulation and manufacturing context while IFS brings the service history, asset behaviour and operational lifecycle data that show how those products and assets perform in the real world. Together, they plan to create a closed loop digital twin grounded in both design intent and field performance that is secure, governed and auditable across design, simulation, service records and factory execution.

Unlike generic AI models, industrial environments demand accuracy, reliability, regulatory compliance and adaptability to drive optimisation and agility, as even small error rates are unacceptable when decisions affect safety, compliance and costly physical assets.

“Industrial AI only delivers value when it is grounded in both engineering intent and real-world performance,” said Tony Hemmelgarn, president and chief executive officer, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Together with IFS, we are bringing these domains together by connecting design, manufacturing and asset lifecycle data in a secure, contextualised data fabric.”

“Manufacturers need their factory floor to behave the way it was designed. This partnership with Siemens brings together two companies that each own a critical piece of the puzzle,” said Mark Moffat, chief executive officer, IFS. “Agentic AI is the critical frontier, and industrial leaders need solutions with closed loop models and data, and a rich set of context that will not hallucinate in active operations.

“By combining our collective strengths in industrial AI, we can help manufacturers close the loop between design and reality, and unlock real, measurable performance gains.”

Image credit: iStock.com/gorodenkoff