Volvo CE: Construction goes electric… shhhh

“It’s amazing how comfortable the machines are by taking noise and vibration away.”

You’re about to walk past roadworks on your street, ready to throw your hands up over your ears - when you realize you don’t have to stop your conversation. In fact, you can even hear the birds singing. Bliss. 

This is the promise of the electric construction vehicle. Although essential, the construction industry has a big impact on both climate and noise pollution, so Volvo Construction Equipment is leading the charge in turning the industry green.

Setting up at Volvo CE’s North American Customer Center, we meet Dave Vandersleen, Ray Gallant and Lars Arnold. Find out how these electric machines actually feel better, more reactive and stronger than their predecessors. Hear the impressive ECR25 compact excavator gearing up. And find out why these machines are being used in zoos - one of many unique and unexpected applications. 

We also hear from Mark Lobo, who heads PTC’s Windchill product lifecycle management division. He explains how Windchill allows Volvo CE to manage its complex vehicle development process. 

Find out more about Volvo Construction Equipment here.

Find out more about Windchill here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Location recording by Rachel McDevitt. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle. Today, we learn about the electric machines driving forward the construction industry.

I’m your host, Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical, and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. 

Imagine hearing the birds sing, even while construction is going on right outside your window. Or imagine a building being demolished in near-complete silence. These are just a few of the promises of electric vehicles for the construction industry. Not only is this industry a noise polluter, it has a big impact on the climate too. But it is essential. It plays a vital role in the development of every country around the world. That’s why it needs to go green – and Volvo construction equipment is at the forefront of the revolution. We sent our producer Rachel McDevitt to meet the team.

I’m Ray Gallant, I’m the Vice President of Product Management and productivity here at Volvo CE.

My name is Lars Arnold, I’m the product manager for e-mobility, or sustainability.

I’m Dave Vandersleen, Sub-Portfolio Manager for CAD and PDM applications. 

So you’re here at the customer centre on the Shippensburg campus, we have 40 acres of developed area here. And the purpose of it is that we can bring customers in and test various machines in applications similar to what they’re actually going to be doing. 

So here is our demonstration area. So we have the machines staged here. We have different areas where they can do different activities with the machines. We have a big apron here where periodically we do shows with the machines and demonstrate all the different machines and a choreography display that everybody can get a good idea of what the machines do and have a little fun with it.

So here at Shippensburg, we make compaction machines, so machines for compacting soil and asphalt, and we’ve been making them here since the 1970s, I believe. We also manufacture wheel loaders. We’re focusing more and more on electric machines. So we have the electric loader, electric excavator, and we’re working on other electric products as well.

The compact equipment is mainly used in utility jobs for small trench work, for water lines, for electrical conduit lines, things like that. They’re used inside buildings for building construction work. They’re used in the landscaping and general municipal work.

So this is the ECR25 6,000lb-rated compact excavator, the first mini excavator we’re coming out with in North America. So this machine is very similar as the diesel machines, so we have the same boom, arm structure, undercarriage, cabin – 80% of the parts are the same. The main difference is that the diesel engine and fuel tank has been replaced by a set of lithium-ion batteries, feeding an electric motor, driving the hydraulic pump. Okay, to start up the machine, master switch on, climbing into the machine, turning on the ignition, and, as the machines getting ready, putting on the seatbelt because the machine has a very loud seatbelt warning. And now I push a button, and the machine is up and running. So it’s very very quiet. That’s the noise we have on this machine. And it’s so good because a quiet machine enables you to talk with bystanders. With a diesel machine, I would need to idle down or turn off the engine. So, in this machine, you can hear me now. It’s very easy to communicate with people. I’m in a diesel machine right now. The same size machine, ECR25 diesel, I need to turn on the master switch. Crank. [loud engine noise] A little bit different to the electric machine, isn’t it? 

One of the things that we took into account when designing these new electric machines is that a lot of the components didn’t have to change. The boom and arm, for instance, if it worked fine on the diesel machine, then we left it alone. And we only changed what we had to, to incorporate the electric drives, and take advantage of the special features they have. So if their torque curves are different, we redesigned the hydraulic systems to take advantage of the new torque characteristics of an electric drive versus a diesel drive.

In comparing the diesel machine versus the electric machine, operators are telling us that the electric machines feel better. It’s more reactive. And of course this makes sense, because a diesel engine, to get more flow, the RPM needs to go up, and this has some kind of lag. Electric motors are on instantly, providing instant torque, and the machine feels more active. Actually, some customers tell us that the machines feel stronger than the diesel machine. So they feel great, actually. We can compare them to cordless power tools. More and more consumers are going for the yard equipment like a string trimmer, blower, lawn mower, electric. And it’s amazing how much easier it is to operate it instead of starting, pulling, mixing two-stroke fuel, taking care about fuel filter, priming, the air filter on equipment – you simply pop in two batteries, push a button and it starts. And electric cars are similar. So, overnight, when you’re not using the machine, the car, plug it into outlet, charge it overnight. The next morning, you simply turn on the master switch, start the ignition and the machine is ready to go. And the machine is driving the right now here behind us. A normal diesel machine would be much more noisy, very noisy. It’s amazing how comfortable the machines are by taking vibration and noise away.

One of the unique applications that we ran into early on in our demo in electric equipment was with the Toronto Zoo in Canada, where they brought the electric equipment inside the pens where the animals were free ranging. And one of the things that they found was, because of the low noise, low emissions, and low vibrations, the animals didn’t get agitated nearly as quickly as they did with the diesel equipment. So they were able to work with diesel equipment for about half an hour, 45 minutes before the animals would start getting agitated. With the electric equipment, they were able to work much longer periods of time and the animals weren’t bothered at all by it. So it was kind of unique to see our equipment working around bison and giraffes and other animals in a zoo environment, which is not an application that we would have probably picked out or designed for, but happened to be an application that the electric machines were perfect for. 

One of the things that we’re saying is that our customers are bringing applications to us that of course we could have never foreseen. But because of the features of the electric machines – the quietness, low vibration, and low emissions – they’re coming up with applications where they couldn’t use a diesel machine before, but the electric machine worked fine. So it’s replacing manual labour on some jobs, it’s less intrusive on some jobs. It’s less bothersome in a lot of applications. So they’re forwarding the applications to us now, rather than us having to try to think of new applications for these machines. 

We’ve seen them used quite a bit in indoor applications. So working around sensitive areas where it’s either noise sensitive or emission sensitive. These machines are perfect for that. We’ve seen them work in a lot of municipal areas where the municipalities are very concerned with keeping the noise down and keeping disturbance down for the residents around, and especially when you come to off-hours work, so if something happens and the middle of the night – a water main break or something like that – and you need to get it fixed, these machines are perfect because they have much less noise and disturbance than traditional machine would have.

One of the limitations when it comes to charging solutions that customers are looking at is the infrastructure can sometimes be very expensive to put in conduits to bring in the right amperage, voltage, or electricity to run these chargers. So, customers are looking for alternates that they can put out on a job site, run for three, four months, or even three, four weeks in some cases, and be able to charge your machines and then be able to pick up that equipment and move it to another site, to the next job site they’re going on. So that’s becoming a big part of our offering, is how do we get off-grid charging available, by solar, wind, portable batteries, hot-swapping batteries, whatever method we can do to make sure the customer always has ready access to the fuel source, which in this case is electricity.

What you see here is an off-grid solar charger. There is no foundation needed. There’s no cording, connections, even building permits required. It’s only set on the place, the only thing it needs is a firm, level ground and a nice position that no buildings or trees obstructing the sunshine to the solar array. It has electric motors, so the solar panels actually follow the sun over the daytime, adjusting it through the perfect angle towards the sunshine. The electricity is then stored in lithium-ion batteries on top, actually nine feet high in the air. So this unit is also designed for areas where hurricanes and flooding can happen, so we have emergency power if there should be a power outage.

We’re also looking more and more at doing things in a virtual world. So instead of during the early production process, we build prototypes. Instead of building them with physical machines out of steel, we can build them in a virtual world and even do virtual assembly prototyping. So, with a virtual factory, operators can put a headset on and see how the machines go together in a virtual world well before we have anything in steel, when it’s a lot easier to make changes. Because to make a change in a virtual environment takes minutes, depending on how big the change is, compared to days or weeks to make a change on a real machine. I don’t know if we’re going to the metaverse yet, but definitely more virtual, and even giving customers access to virtual machines, so they can see what the machines look like, and even sit in a machine and operate it in a virtual world before we ever sell them.

That was Dave Vandersleen, Ray Gallant and Lars Arnold speaking to our producer Rachel. Now, to design, manufacture, and service their vehicles, Volvo CE relies on a network of employees, external partners, and customers. It’s really quite complex. And that’s why they chose PTC’s Product Lifecycle Management Solution, Windchill, to manage the vehicle development process. Let’s find out more. Time to meet our expert Mark Lobo, who heads up PTC’s Windchill PLM division. Mark, can you start by telling us what Windchill does and how Volvo construction equipment is using it?

So let’s just start off with Windchill first. Windchill helps companies, typically discrete manufacturing companies like Volvo CE, manage their products throughout the entire lifecycle. So it orchestrates the flow of product data between many different business systems, and really enables a seamless secure collaboration between folks that create the information and consumers of that product information, I would say both within the company and the extended enterprise. 

When you consider all of the business processes, it really starts off with managing product and process requirements. Then you get into typical R&D engineering processes like product design, engineering, building material management, product, product line, variability, and complexity. You hear the Volvo construction product managers talk a lot about that. Then you get into managing suppliers, the supply chain, and into a streamlined collaboration with downstream stakeholders in manufacturing, shop floor, quality engineering service teams. So while this product information is being shared and augmented at every stage, there’s full traceability with robust, powerful configuration and change management processes in Windchill that wraps around all of these steps. 

Now, if you turn for a minute to Volvo Construction Equipment, or Volvo CE, it’s a great example of a customer who has truly matured on their PLM, or digital thread journey as we like to call it here, and is benefiting from any of the synergies between product size and projects. Let me give you a quick example of how they went about doing that. First things first for many companies is about getting your digital house in order, so to speak. And it started with an end-to-end product development process based on a single source of product data, that was Windchill, to create more efficient ways of working and an optimised user experience and toolchain integration. 

The next thing that was really critical for Volvo CE was this common product architecture. Now, let me step back for a minute. Volvo CE has five product lines, 270 models, 18,000+ options and choices. Those are built around 11 factories. And you heard the product managers talk a lot about moving to hybrid and electrical machines; autonomous, connected solutions. So this common architecture with the shared technology really became critical for fast delivery of these new versions and the new products at the lowest cost. So they established a programme to facilitate this transformation, and move the company towards the state-of-the-art architecture approach. So I think these are all critical things. And the last thing I’ll just jump in there and say is that the electronics software and connectivity played a central role at Volvo CE across all of these product lines, and the features are no longer delivered through mechanical components. Instead, they are also enabled by smart software. An example is a single hauler could have an exponential increase in specification and software modules from one product update to the next. In fact, they have 4,000 different software modules that go into these haulers in the electric version. So, that’s just to give you a sense of the level of product complexity and the journey they’ve been on.

And Mark, how does a company the size and scope of Volvo CE, with 14,000 employees working across 140 countries, how do they transform to improve the speed of execution and become a more agile organisation through the use of Windchill?

This isn’t something you probably hear about much, but I think it’s really extremely important to the success of such a transformation like we’ve seen at Volvo Construction Equipment. It’s really organisational change management, or OCM. It’s as important as the product and the processes that we spoke about earlier. Now, remember I said Volvo CE is a huge company – five product lines, 270 models – along with this whole new push into hybrid and electrical machines. And when you think about companies at that level, they’re trying to establish governance and process, and then harmonise the teams around that. But that really always doesn’t work. So Volvo take a slightly different tack, which is they focused on early adopters on the ground floor, who then acted as change agents throughout the organisation. So a bottom-up approach by having each community help define the vision and value in making those changes. 

Once these frontline workers were trained first, they then drove the change management by helping other team members learn and adopt that solution across the company, which was Windchill. What this did was it created a viral approach to training and adoption with change spread naturally throughout the organisation. So definitely one of the key initiatives in a transformation such as at Volvo Construction Equipment is organisational change management.