The Launch of Nexus

When someone asks you to help them transform a multi-billion dollar industry - you can hardly say no, can you?Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence helps industrial manufacturers develop the disruptive technologies of today and the life-changing products of tomorrow. They approached us wanting to create a new smart manufacturing platform, one that would revolutionise how the industry collaborates and innovates.

This is the story of how we tackled it.

Our Approach

It all started in September 2021 with a two-day workshop at the UK headquarters in Cobham, Surrey, where we met with a group of key business leaders and product owners to better understand the vision behind the project. Those initial conversations were crucial for our discovery processes - enabling us to combine user research with existing insights to inform the design process and technical delivery. Making sure it was a collaborative process from the very beginning was essential to us, and we were able to work alongside Manufacturing Intelligence product teams across the globe to shape this overall direction.Internally, we built a high-performing team around the client and scaled quickly to meet demand. This meant we could implement a user-first, fast-paced approach to hit critical milestones in the agreed SAFe agile framework.

From there, Nexus was born.

The name ‘Nexus’ came from an exhaustive, collaborative branding process with multiple stakeholders across the organisation. With its definition rooted in connectivity and meaning a “central focal point”, it reflected both the scale and ambition of the portal and how it aims to transform the smart manufacturing industry.Once this identity was created, this then led to:

• Creation of a full design system, ready to roll out across multiple software types from web-based apps to complex engineering software.
• Revamp of software brand identity guides, ready to implement across the 800+ products in Hexagon’s global software portfolio.
• Working with product, technology and marketing teams to coordinate output and ensure the Nexus brand is consistently applied.
• Content creation and implementation of robust governance processes to manage complex subject matters and approvals.
• The design and build of the customer portal, making it easy for customers to access products, solutions and support.

We’re now in Beta, ready to roll out to a select number of customers in the coming weeks. And we’re already well on the way with planning our next feature sets - including personalisation, connected workflows and richer content., Launching through digital experiences and video

Nexus is much more than the customer portal - it’s a transformational project. Many other teams were hard at work developing advanced collaboration and workflow technologies too. We were tasked to launch the amazing collective efforts to audiences and bring them on the journey with us.We sought to introduce and build excitement in the industry through immersive interactive experiences, to tell the Nexus story and provide key value and insight to early users. This required solutions over and above a regular landing page to truly reflect the scale.Our solutions included:

• An "interactive launch page":https://nexus.hexagon.com/ utilising video and animation to showcase the functionality and benefits of the portal.
• An "interactive, 3D showroom":https://nexus.hexagon.com/experiences/showroom/ to launch and bring Nexus to live at the annual HxGN Live conference in Las Vegas. This allowed conference attendees to walk through a virtual showroom and see how software and hardware products can link seamlessly to better manufacturing processes.
• A video to showcase how Nexus will integrate with Microsoft Teams to better collaborate virtually. This was presented by Chief Executive of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, during his opening keynote at the MS Build conference.
• A video to show how Nexus will be at the heart of the future of smart manufacturing.

Our journey with Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence has only just begun, and we’re excited about what the future holds. Keep an eye out for the full case study coming soon!In the meantime, if you’d like us to shape your digital transformation project, get in touch.