BMW Group Develop Custom Application on NVIDIA Omniverse for Factory Planners

BMW Group is at the forefront of leveraging virtual factories to optimize layouts, robotics and logistics systems in manufacturing. Years before production even begins, factory planners start to work in virtual environments powered by NVIDIA Omniverse™ to ensure smooth operation and efficiency.

At BMW’s virtual Debrecen EV plant, the power and agility of planning industrial manufacturing plants can be seen firsthand. Using Omniverse, logistics and production planners can animate processes in the factory, performing tasks such as visualizing and identifying optimal placement for robots in constrained spaces. The plant is a precise virtual replica of the real world factory set to open in 2025, and is expected to produce 150,000 electric vehicles per year.

BMW has a vast workforce of factory planners, including those working at facilities like the future Debrecen plant, who play a critical role in the planning and operations of the company's factories worldwide. Their jobs are highly complex, and even the slightest miscalculations or mistakes can result in significant real-world costs. This is why physically accurate virtual planning is highly desirable, as it allows planners to experiment and make changes at practically no cost.

Using virtual environments in Omniverse, planners can pre-optimize production processes before committing to massive construction projects and capital expenditures. This approach significantly reduces costs and production downtime caused by change orders and flow re-optimizations on existing facilities. The cost of shutting down a factory, or even parts of assembly lines, can be enormous, as illustrated by Ross Krambergar of BMW Group.

“If we shut down for two weeks, that’s two weeks where we’re not earning any money whatsoever. And it’s two weeks where we cannot get that time back,” said Krambergar. The plant produces new vehicles every minute, so every minute not building a car is the price of a car lost.

Since factory planners have diverse specializations and levels of expertise with complex software, delivering a highly intuitive application that could be used without extensive instructions was paramount. Leveraging Omniverse, BMW was able to create a customizable user experience.

This approach allowed BMW to create a user interface that focuses on the relevant functions for executing the most crucial tasks inside the virtual world.

To connect various teams working on different areas and elements of the factory, a centralized platform was needed. To solve this, BMW built their own metaverse application using Omniverse, which has allowed BMW’s team to have a holistic planning solution that is always consistent with current planning data. 

Prior to the implementation of Omniverse, digital content workflows were manual with low levels of sharing and re-usability. The teams were heavily reliant on in-person meetings and static planning documents to align on projects. 

The BMW Internal Metaverse has transformed the way BMW's team collaborates on projects, resulting in improved productivity, streamlined communication, and increased agility in responding to changing market demands. Instead of meeting in a physical location, teams can collaborate live remotely with multiple users in large scenes and data from different domains. 

A typical working group in BMW’s Metaverse consists of twenty five people made up of planners, conductors, developers, and managers who meet virtually in a specific factory scene. Together, they conduct a Gemba Walk of the factory floor to review and assess specific areas of the factory, ensuring that every variable in part of the factory is optimized for safe production and operation.

Conductors manage the flow of the session and prepare the scene, positioning objects, checking the status of data, and setting waypoints for the main topics to walk through. During the walkthrough, specific areas of interest are evaluated jointly. Ideas for optimizing the situation or to get rid of a problem are discussed and documented in markups that are pinned to the respective object. It is possible to move or reposition objects to better fit the overall requirements. In the end, a change report with all the findings, annotations, and actual changes can be created and is handed back to the responsible planners in order to make the necessary changes in the source systems.