Building upon a 25-year partnership, Hexagon and the automotive manufacturer Seat have signed a strategic agreement that aims to deepen the digital transformation of Seat, focusing on the digitalization of vehicle components, the management of digitized information and advanced process simulation.

This agreement enables the Spanish car maker to optimize its production, making decisions on adjustments to its processes in real time. Hexagon has been instrumental in Seat’s production for many years, having implemented its measurement and quality control systems. Now through the extended collaboration, the joint project team will integrate a digital twin that applies metrology data with process simulations to predict outcomes and improve manufacturing efficiency. The solution will make use of innovative systems to digitize the car body and its components, manage their data, and provide reports and analytics that help production personnel drive efficiency, and reduce costs.

The collaboration is based on three fundamental pillars: the digitalization of the manufactured parts of the vehicle, the management of digitized information and the simulation of processes.

Seat relies on Hexagon’s quality inspection and 3D digitization solutions, which it has implemented in its inspection and manufacturing processes for body components. Under the new agreement, Hexagon’s Presto system will fully automate the high-precision 3D laser scanning of the entire body with high-speed robotic inspection, allowing every detail of the car to be measured and evaluated in real-time.

The second pillar of the agreement is the management of digitized information, which uses Hexagon’s eMMA data management, quality planning and analytics platform. This solution automatically captures metrology data from Hexagon and other third-party measurement systems and manages it in a standardized way. The centralization of all 3D measurement data captured during the digitalization process facilitates informed and efficient decision-making, allowing Seat’s production and quality managers to monitor the condition of the parts and optimize quality in all phases of assembly.

The third key aspect is process simulation, which allows Seat’s quality analysts to accurately predict problems and optimize critical vehicle manufacturing processes such as part alignment, assembly and subsequent welding operations. Thanks to Hexagon’s simulation solutions, Seat can optimize production and adjust the production settings using a virtual prototype of the product, speeding up the process of fine-tuning the production methods that will be used in the series manufacturing phase. This capability translates into a significant reduction in costs, a reduction in material waste, and an improvement in the time-to-market for the new vehicle models.