Taking Flight: Enabling Unmanned Aerial Missions with Autodesk Fusion

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Welcome, everyone, to our presentation. Taking Flight, SwissDrones Enables Unmanned Aerial Missions with Autodesk Fusion. My name is Jonathan. I've been working together with SwissDrones for the past few years on their use of our software, and I'm really excited to talk with Alex, who's joining us on this presentation as well. And we're going to give you some insight into how SwissDrones is working with Fusion and creating these amazing products.

Just before we kick off, a quick safe harbor statement, in case in our conversation we make any statements that are forward-looking, and about any forward-looking functionality and the software, then this gives us the security that those are not promises but desires.

All right. And with that, we can start off with the agenda. What are we going to talk about today in our presentation? First off, we'll give you an introduction and company overview as well about SwissDrones. Next, we're going to walk through some challenges and the incredible achievements SwissDrones was able to reach with their drone.

Then next, we've got a product spotlight. We're going to have a look at the actual dual rotor, the intermeshing UAV. And after that, the team that brings it together, speaking about how they collaborate together. In point number 5, we're going to talk about how the team at SwissDrones is leveraging Autodesk Fusion. And then next, we'll speak about manufacturing and iteration. And last but not least, of course, we'll speak about the conclusions and leave space for any Q&A if we need it.

And with that, let's go over and have a look who you're speaking to. So you've heard my voice now a little bit. My name is Jonathan Geffen. I'm a senior technical specialist working for Fusion out of the Barcelona office in Spain. Originally, I'm an industrial designer. I've been working for Autodesk now for about 6 and 1/2 years, and I'm covering the EMEA market, so anything in Europe, Middle East and Africa is under my care. And I have the pleasure to work with companies such as SwissDrones. And with that, I want to have Alex introduce himself. He can do that.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Thank you, Jonathan, for inviting me. Yes, I'm the program manager at SwissDrones for the V3 aircraft, which is currently the aircraft that is out in the market and flying all around the world. And with that together, I do the Head of Office of Airworthiness function at SwissDrones, which ensures that all the aircrafts are always flying.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Fantastic. Let's have a look at the actual company and give you an introduction to who is SwissDrones, where are they, and what do they do. And of course, there's no better way to do that than with their own company film. So that's what we're going to kick start right now.

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- A leading manufacturer and operator of long range unmanned helicopter systems, SwissDrones enables safe and cost-effective unmanned aerial intelligence solutions for surveillance, inspection, and search and rescue missions beyond visual line of sight.

SwissDrones' unique twin rotor unmanned helicopter systems are designed to replace manned helicopters at reduced costs, significantly lower carbon emissions, and without putting crews at risk when operating in challenging conditions.

The systems allow for integration of high-end sensor payloads and enable long-range, beyond visual line of sight operations, both at day and night, with a flight endurance of multiple hours. SwissDrones' aircraft are in operation across Asia, Europe, and North America.

SwissDrones was founded in 2013 and is based out of Switzerland with its headquarters in Zurich, and its manufacturing site in Buchs. It has been named a Top 50 Global UAV Enterprise by the World UAV Federation and a Top 40 Civil Drone Platform Manufacturer by Drone industry Insights.

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JONATHAN GEFFEN: I am already incredibly inspired and looking forward to learning more. And I think we've seen a little bit of the history of when SwissDrones was founded. But Alex, maybe can you walk us through the most important steps, especially also as it relates to your collaboration with Autodesk or your use of Autodesk software?

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Absolutely. So as also the video already said, the company was founded in 2013. So we're a very old startup. And to say that, and it started with the team of four people, with the RC background, with the intention to make a business out of it. So already a year later, the first V1 was released and flew. And with that, the journey began.

In 2019, we had our first Fusion 360 account. I checked that in the hub today, but we only used it for CAM because all the design was still in Inventor, and because the team was still very small, a local drive was plenty. This changed though in 2020 when we moved to Fusion as a main CAD and also CAM solution, because we could work there multiple engineers on a cloud base. And this really enabled us to scale up. And then in 2023, we released to market the V3, which is nowadays flying all around the world.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: What an incredible journey already for, like you say, an old startup. But yeah, definitely with an innovative product. Now, it's not easy to get started in a field like this, I'm sure. We've spoken about this quite a bit already. So the next segment I'd love to learn more about the challenges and achievements that you've had. I know I also come from industrial design and from product development. And depending on the industry that you're serving, there can be a whole ton of different challenges. And I would expect that, especially in an industry and a segment as regulated as aerospace, there are incredible challenges that you had to go through.

So maybe next, let's speak about a couple of the common challenges in the aviation industry that you faced.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Well, first of all, it's a new market. So everybody thinks that the drones are the solution for everything. And we're trying to match for actually use cases that make sense on a functional side, but also as a business model. And so we need to find together with the new customers that sometimes still don't really know what they want, what can I do with it? Again, this is the use cases. It's not for everything, but there are some really good use cases that we could actually replace the helicopter.

Then what we also faced is there are different kinds of customers. We have customers from an aviation background. So we talk already the same language. But then there are other people that come from smaller drones and are not aviation with an aviation background. And this makes it a little bit more difficult. But we are getting there.

Then on the technical side, I mentioned this three times, is weight. Why? Because in the aviation, you are punished twice for every gram or pound that you take with, because every pound in addition makes you heavier, but also allows you to take less fuel with, so you get double punishment.

Then the impact analysis of the whole assembly is crucial in aviation because we have so many dependencies within the systems. Robustness is getting more and more a factor because we are not prototyping anymore. We're not a hobby company. It's not a toy. People actually try to make business out of this and therefore need a reliable solution. And then last, design to cost, most business cases claim that the unmanned aircraft are cheaper than manned aircrafts. But then we need to prove this with our design to cost optimizations.

A big thing is regulatory because in every country there's a different regulator. For example, FAA in the US, Transport Canada, EASA in whole Europe, ANAC in Brazil, and CASA in Australia are just examples that are gatekeepers to use their airspace. And for that, we have quite some requirements to fulfill to be allowed to fly in their airspace. And this is maybe different a little bit than from the smaller drones, because after a certain weight category, you are accounted for. You're identified as an aircraft.

Then this leads that we need design control. So we need revisions. We need releases. We need a life cycle. This is a prototype. Is it phased out? And we need a configuration control of every design on all the aircrafts. We call them BOMs. And there goes also the traceability. And if we have any issues of some components, we need to know in what aircraft this is built in. And this is where the BOMs help us in design, but also in the manufacturing.

Then obviously design control, so we're using state of the art solution for 3D creation and also drawings and that keep us on top of things and make sure that we don't have any collisions and that we know where the weight is, where the center of gravity is. All this comes with a modern design solution. And last, what I am really fond of is the variant control. And we all know it. When we buy a car, there's a ton of things you can choose from. This is also a challenging part in the background, in the engineering side, how do I put this into a CAD solution and into PLM?

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Wow. That sounds like a lot of work and a lot of challenges to overcome. It seems that you've already done this, so congratulations on that as well. And before we dive a little bit deeper into how you've actually solved these, especially on the regulatory side, which I find quite fascinating, regarding the BOMs, the traceability, the design control, life cycles, et cetera, we'll dive a bit deeper here.

I do also want to know more about your journey and your accomplishments that you've been able to achieve already. So maybe you can tell me a little bit about the numbers.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes. So during our more than 10 years of existence, we produced more than 45 aircrafts. Please keep in mind there are almost 100 kilos, so that's almost 200 pounds of an aircraft. So this average is in about five per year. We have logged much more than thousand hours in the air, which is quite an achievement in the drone world. And we were the first to get an FAA exemption in our weight category in the US, which we are really proud of.

And then last we received an in Europe, which we were the fifth in Europe.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Incredible. I'm amazed. Now, you've told me a little bit about this before already, but I'm sure that our viewers are very interested to learn a little bit more about what an FAA exemption is and what an LUC is. Maybe you can give us a little bit more insight here.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes so the FAA, they're the regulatory in the US, and they pretty much say what is allowed to fly and what is not. And for their drone base, they don't have a platform to certify us, and therefore an exemption was needed. So you're not allowed to fly within this category. We're not a quadcopter in a small scale. And for that, we needed an exemption, which meant that we needed to prove that the aircraft is safe to fly in the midst of manned aircrafts.

And similarly goes for EASA in Europe. And the LUC means a light unmanned certificate. They have actually solved the problem slightly differently because they have a drone regulatory platform, and there it's risk based. So the heavier you are, the faster you are, the more damage you can theoretically create. And therefore, you need more mitigations to ensure safe missions.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Absolutely fascinating to learn more about your journey and your accomplishments. So I can congratulate you here already. And it's just fascinating to see that you're able to do this with such a unique product and such a unique design. And as you just mentioned, you needed some exemptions for this design. I think maybe next, let's take a look at the actual design, the actual product, the SDO 50, and maybe you can give us some explanation about what this is. It looks curious. It looks very familiar, like a helicopter. But yet, there's a fundamental difference about this.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes, I will start probably from the most abnormal design feature, which is the intermeshing rotors. We didn't invent it. This was already put in place, I think, in the '40s during the Second World War. But the really advantage is here I have two rotors that pull me up in the sky. This means that I don't have any power losses like other normal helicopters that have a tail rotor. With the tail rotor, you lose about 20% of your thrust and therefore you decrease efficiencies.

This is where the intermeshing design, as a drone itself, if we compare ourselves to manned aircraft, especially helicopters, we do use a lot less fuel, which results in 95% reduction in CO2. And we have but still a large payload capacity. So this is up to 95 pounds. And so we are reaching almost 100 kilos as a takeoff weight, which gives you some capabilities to work with.

And we're really quick in getting in the air. So 15 minutes, and then you're on your mission. We also have maximum speed of 45 miles per hour, which is fast for a drone, but it actually does the job more than well done for the sensors that we carry, because they actually want us to fly slow. And this gives us a competitive advantage, especially comparing us to fixed wing drones. And comparing especially to smaller drones, we actually stay in the air for quite some time, so two hours is perfectly fine.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Wow. I think it looks really impressive. I didn't know this beforehand. You hadn't told me this, that this design already existed. But I'm sure it didn't exist in such a modern package with so much technology attached to it, like you have. So I know that these drones are in action. You were saying that you've already built 45 of these units. Can you explain a little bit more about where they're deployed?

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes so we are deployed everywhere where the small quadcopters cannot operate anymore. So this can be a weight of your sensor or the amount of fuel that we carry. And I always say fuel because it's not an electric aircraft. You can see it has an exhaust. This is because liquid fuel is still more energy dense than batteries. We try also to fly longer than the electric drones. Your average with electric, vertical takeoff and land drones to about 40 minutes max, and for certain missions, especially when you go beyond visual line of sight, then you need to fly longer. And that's where we come into play.

And then last, why a helicopter? Not just because it's fun to take off vertically. Sometimes you don't have a runway you want to take off next to the road. And you can be very spontaneous, very adaptive with your vertical takeoff and land capabilities.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: This is also quite curious. You're right. Those exhausts, I had seen them in your Fusion model, and I was curious to know more about that. As well, I saw in your model and you alluded to that already in the beginning, that you've got variants inside here with additional fuel tanks on the sides, I think I would assume that it's also quite easy to then refuel in comparison to having to charge a battery. Right?

ALEXANDER LEMUS: There are some solutions that I have seen where you just replace the battery. But for our purpose, we just fill up the tank. Just as your car or most cars are still nowadays, you just fuel them up, and then you're back and ready to fly again after five minutes, refuel.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Amazing. I can imagine as well that these drones and with the ability to work with an old school sort of fuel burning engine, make them really versatile in the areas that they can operate in. And I know that this is an area that you can talk about next. So let's understand a bit more about the different applications that a drone system like this could have.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes, so what we are looking for is for missions that are repetitive, that are in unpopulated areas, and are let's say easy to solve with a sensor. And then the first thing that comes is inspection and monitoring. And you have long power lines, gas lines. There are linear missions and they require low, slow flight, which our platform is ideal for.

Then we have an aerial surveillance, where we just put a gimbal below. And this is also nice because we are not as high as the military solutions. We can fly very low and still be in a good range at day and at night. So this is also ideal, because we can loiter. We can hover as much as we like.

And then the last one is search and rescue. This is not the same mission we hope every time. But the advantage here is that we can actually take something with. So we can have a sensor with infrared that detects lost people also at night. And with that, we could also theoretically take some rescue equipment with me, that be a raft, or medicine, or even just a blanket just to survive the night, which with smaller drones, this is not possible.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Fascinating. I would, of course, never want to find myself in a situation where a drone is dropping a blanket on top of me because I got lost on top of a mountain. But it's fantastic that you can do that. Now, those other areas or those other applications that you have for your drone system. I find quite fascinating. And while I'm more in the design and manufacturing space and come from that industry, of course Autodesk does also cover other industries, such as for example, the infrastructure industry as well.

So I found it quite curious this inspection and monitoring of infrastructure. And because of that, I had a little bit of a look around on the web, and found this cool video about your drone system being used in inspection. And that's what we're going to check out next.

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- OK. 100% switch.

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- The flight itself was went pretty well. We have still to download the payload [INAUDIBLE]. The preview seems quite good. We are confident that we will impress RTE.

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JONATHAN GEFFEN: All right. Wow. Super, super impressive, again, to see actually how these drones can be applied in real-world scenarios and how obviously you were able to persuade with your solution because it's able to carry this payload. To get a product like this on the market is no easy feat and it requires a team, and it requires that team to be able to collaborate.

So let's have a look next at what the team is and what you actually do. Alex, maybe you can give us a little bit of an insight into the SwissDrones team.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes. So when I started, we were around eight people five years ago. Now we are 50 employees with different challenges in this size of a company. But it's fantastic. We have more than 20 engineers now that drive innovation at SwissDrones. We have more than 10 mechanics that are completely embedded in Fusion also. And they actually assemble the aircraft and give us great feedback.

Collaboration and trust are the core, I think, of our success, especially between the engineering and the production department. We work together. And I would even go further that the engineers, we actually work for production, we treat them as our customers, and not as our servants or that they produce something for us.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: I absolutely love those points. You can see the collaboration and trust are emboldened because I think that is really fundamental for a team. But it's also something that I'm very happy you were able to or are able to work with using our solution.

Now that last line, production is the customer, not the servant. Could you elaborate a little bit more on this? Because I think this is super interesting.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes, absolutely. So from my other companies, it was more that the engineers would design something, and then the guys from production were here to assemble it. But it's more like a push of design data, and with the assumption that the engineers did everything right, which is seldomly the case. We actually enjoy the practical feedback from production and therefore we treat them as our customers, because their feedback is fantastic. And they have their customers, which are actually our real customers that buy the aircraft. So if everything is in line, that will deliver a fantastic product.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: That really speaks for you as an actual team that is working together on one common goal. I think that's amazing, and again, also something I think that speaks for working on a common platform where design and manufacturing are part of one solution. And we'll get into those details in a little bit. But now next, there's a subset of your entire company that you are also part of, and that's the PLM team at SwissDrones. Maybe you can introduce you three.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes. I wanted to introduce the three people that made Fusion happen a couple of years ago at SwissDrones. And this was Pol. He's a team leader in the mechanical team now. And we onboarded him right from the beginning at Fusion. So he didn't know anything about Fusion. But we onboarded him right away. And he was out engineer that we tried to see how much Fusion 360 would be a fit. And with that, he has gained an absolute gigantic amount of experience with it, and has helped us since to build up the PLM architecture.

We did get some help from outside of SwissDrones with Bjorn. He's an external PLM architect. And he helped us set this up. And he had some experience in Fusion 360. And we were just about that time that Fusion developed itself more from a-- not like a manufacturer or a tinkerer software to a more professional field when they moved. And we saw that they had all our requirements fulfilled.

So this is why we induced Fusion 360 at that time. And then last thing comes me. I was just there, but I set up the requirements for the PLM solutions because I come from larger companies with other PLM solutions. And then those have all rings and bells, but really there's not that much needed. And especially afterwards with the Fusion Manage, we had everything we needed in a very fast implementation.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: And Alex, maybe as we move to the next slide as well, we can speak a little bit about why it's necessary even that you have your own PLM team. I know that information flows and you have a lot of regulatory requirements. Maybe just walk us through how information does flow, and what's the importance for a PLM team to be able to manage all of this?

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes. So from the left, we have the inputs that lead to work done in Fusion. We do our project management on a different platform. I know Fusion includes it also, but we do other things in addition to design data. So we have a centralized project management infrastructure for this.

We have requirements management where we manage requirements that apply to designs, but also apply to operations or quality in any other field. This is why it comes from outside. The first couple of months, we import data from Inventor from our existing designs. This was included in Fusion. We also account for external designs, so we don't carry all the load by ourselves. We do give some missions out for external design companies, and they just upload their designs. So whatever platform they're using, it works just fine, and later on also with the release process.

Then change management is a big thing, because we move very fast and this also has an influence on Fusion with plenty of redesigns, optimizations on the go. This leads to our outputs where we produce design data to order them externally for milling, 3D printing, or anything else. This gives us drawings for the assembly in our production. And we also send everything to our ERP system where we conduct all the purchasing with our suppliers.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Fascinating. You mentioned in our preparation as well that obviously you're also using different systems such as the project management, which in theory, you could also do with a full Fusion Manage. Maybe just give us a little bit more insight into why. Why do you also use other tools and how are you able to communicate the data between Autodesk software and other tools?

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yeah, so the center of our project management is outside of Fusion because the actual design tasks, they are really easily managed in the other side. We would probably use the project management within Fusion 360 if design data was the only thing that we would produce. But we have other teams as well. We have production teams, we have flight operation teams, we have sales teams and they all work on our centralized project management infrastructure.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: That makes a lot of sense. And as you mentioned, you've got a lot of different departments and responsibilities spread out across different people. And that surely requires a good working culture. So let's speak about the culture at SwissDrones next.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yeah so culture fit with Fusion 360 was a big requirement. And we are actually very aligned because we define rules by processes. We have very few barriers within Fusion. And I think that is what Fusion is made for. Open doors allow for quicker execution, trainings are easily done. Everybody can see pretty much everything within our hub at SwissDrones. So we are very transparent. And the version history can correct for mistakes because they do happen.

Some people are not used that they can open an assembly and then save it again. And then it's a different version. Despite that it was released already. People will get used to this. It's more of a feature though. Then the release and life cycle define what is up to date. So we always know what's the latest and greatest, even though that somebody might have turned a component and then resaved it. It's always traceable. So I don't feel bad for this.

And then what I'm mostly fond of is that everything feeds into the complete aircraft assembly. That means that we have a single point of truth. We have no system barriers. We don't need to build bridges with anchor points that we need to align between teams where we will put the holes and bolts in. We have a very small risk of collisions within our aircraft assembly, and we have always up to date the mass, which again leads to a takeoff weight within the aircraft. We always know how heavy. Our aircraft is and the weight savings is always a challenge.

And then what we do at the moment is we do variant control by overpopulating our assemblies.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: That last point is something that I learned from you. An overpopulated assembly is maybe not something that everybody else knows. Can you just explain what you mean by an overpopulated assembly.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes. So we call our aircraft the 150% aircraft, because it has five landing gears. And this is what is available. And then production they select and make the other assemblies disappear to get to the configuration they want to. So everything is up at the beginning and then you start deleting, and this has proven to be quite easy.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: That sounds great. And I know that we'll get into more detail on that step as well. So here we go. Let's have a look at how you are leveraging Autodesk Fusion today.

At the core of what you do is creating data. So obviously, the whole data part is very important. Walk me through your Fusion team folder structure. What's important to make this team work, and work collaboratively with all of the data that you create?

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yeah, so we have one SwissDrones hub, where everybody has access to, and we manage projects in there. And we also manage the licenses central. And we use Fusion and Fusion Manage extension for the engineers. We have Fusion 360 for the mechanics. They never print out a drawing. They just open the latest release assembly and check everything there and assemble their components.

And then we have Fusion Team for people in our supply chain, purchase or sales that just need a quick look at the 3D or need to download the files to send to a supplier or feed this into our ERP.

Then we have individual projects to sort our parts. And we have a lot of standard parts. And you have a catalog in Fusion 360, which was quite helpful, instead of designing your own screws. So screws, washers, nuts, they're all there. And they are in our catalog, which means that we have already been using them. Then we have purchased parts that we just import from our suppliers like Servos or autopilots, or connectors. We import the step files or in whatever form they come in. We import them and then we manage it within Fusion.

Then we have our payload projects. We have tools. Then we have one project for each development program. So in my case, the SDO 50 V3, and one of the best projects is the sandbox. So it's open for everybody to try out new things, and most learnings happen there. So I would recommend the sandbox in every hub. Please let the people learn and try things out.

And then we set up the rule. We have one folder per part or assembly just to make a hierarchy on the order. And so inside, we have one part. We have one drawing that is for the part. But we also include other things. And we just upload them from our computers, like spec sheets or electrical drawings. So we have one data package per folder. And we currently are feeding a folder structure that is based on an EBOM. So per system, we have one overarching folder where you can try to find things like landing gears, lights, or propulsion system.

We manage our project's access via the project members and roles. This has been very, very useful for now. And something that we are really proud of, we have a very detailed internal documentation. It's not how to use Fusion, in general, but how we use it to standardize how we work and how designs come out.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: I have one first question for you already because as engineers, we know what you mean by EBOM and we've seen the BOM as well and MBOM. Maybe can you just describe the difference between these different BOMs?

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yes, absolutely. So an EBOM is the engineering bill of materials which puts together functions. For example, your drive train, you follow the path from the engine that goes to your router, and this is your drive train. But you actually never assemble it in that way. So your EBOM is really just for the engineers to know where your energy goes through. This is not very useful for mechanics, because they want to know what to put together.

And for that you would rather have the MBOM, so the manufacturing bill of material, available for them. This means you know what you're putting together in an assembly, in a subassembly, and then combine it into a complete aircraft.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: OK. OK, that makes great sense. Now, on your last point, the internal documentation, I've had the privilege to see your extensive documentation. Do you think the effort was worth it, and why is this point so important to you?

ALEXANDER LEMUS: It's absolutely worth the effort, but also, the timing is important. Do this in the beginning, because engineers are always very excited to try out a new tool, and everybody has a different idea how to design things. So we're trying to get some unity in how things are done as [INAUDIBLE], and therefore we took a lot of time to make this documentation. We have instructions. We have on-boardings. We have design guidelines. We reference a lot of YouTube videos from Autodesk, because they're great for teaching and also Autodesk, they offer these training courses which we have selected the most important ones.

So I would absolutely recommend have your internal documentation, and do them at the beginning because the moment you give access to your team, they love it. But they do it their own way.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Yeah. Again here, I can only congratulate you on how well you've managed to put the functionality together. You're using Fusion Team as the data management, and then Fusion of course, for the design where everything comes together. So Fusion for design, how do you manage to use it? What do you use? And what is very important to you?

ALEXANDER LEMUS: For me, most important is, again, I mentioned my internal documentation because I'm proud of it. But it's the combining of the parts wherever they come from. So standard parts import into one assembly. The legacy parts import. This was very easy. External designs, because we're still small teams, and our proprietary designs, they're conducted on a daily basis within the Fusion envelope. And it's so easy.

People are often trained in other platforms. And with some resistance at the beginning, but afterwards they see how easy it is with Fusion. And I don't think they want to go back. We do the MBOM assemblies after we have our system released. And we actually found a really good tool in the marketplace, which is the BOM from Bommer. And the time that we had included it, that there wasn't anything available. So we used that one.

And what we use there is to add a lot of attributes to our components. So you can add weight, maximum dimension, material density, all sorts of things. We even put prices or suppliers, potential suppliers in there. So this is really you don't see it in 3D, but it's actually what the specialty supply chain, they want to know. So we know ahead of time how heavy our spare part package will be because we feed the BOM with all these attributes.

Then what we do often is the simulation of movements. We can move the whole drivetrain. We check if we're touching any other components that we shouldn't. And this is just a great sanity check if we have done our homework. What I think is really important also is your product breakdown structure. Fusion will push you to go for a very flat hierarchy. But this is fine. We have components, subassemblies, assemblies, and the complete aircraft. You really don't need more.

And the advantage of this is it makes you faster with your independent assemblies that you don't need to release those monster assemblies of hundreds of components. Fusion Manage has this feature too that if you change your component or your subassembly, it will trickle upwards in your release process. So a flat hierarchy will help you not releasing too many assemblies above your change.

And the way we started Fusion actually was for our CAM. So we have a simple C cutting machine. And this is easy because the parts are already released. The production team knows where to find the design data, and they actually derive their CAM files for themselves because they actually know better than us engineers.

And then another interesting feature that I like is that the drawings are independent from your part with respect to release cycle, because you develop a part with the basic dimensions. This is mostly fine, but then it comes to the nitty gritty. You need to change some tolerances here, some tolerances there, and that's where it makes it really easy to just make revisions of your drawings without just revising your whole 3D body, which actually hasn't changed.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Yeah, I think your use of Fusion is what I would consider best in class. So that's fantastic. Also, of course, you reaching outside of the boundaries of what comes out of the box of Fusion, with a third party add-in through Bommer. That gives you additional functionality is exactly why Fusion is a great platform.

Maybe give me a couple more benefits of Fusion for SwissDrones.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yeah. So absolutely. So we look for our cash out, and also infrastructures, we don't want it a server, no VPN, just internet access. This was our dream. And we found it. And this is fantastic. We commute here in Switzerland by train. And some engineers just open their laptops on the train and work on their CAD files. The design feeds into one aircraft assembly. I think this is still was one of the greatest features, and it actually loads. So there's not a two-hour wait until your aircraft loads. Everybody can load the aircraft, and see it, and turn it, and make components disappear. This is also just for basic understanding and it's fantastic.

Pricing is a big thing in a startup, but also scalability. So there is no first onboarding cost and then expensive licenses. I think pricing is very competitive, including the Fusion Manage and now with the license hub is very easy for me to add more licenses to our SwissDrones hub, but also change them. If somebody leaves, I can just swap it to the new entrants, and that this is very easy.

And I'm fond of a single point of truth, so I don't appreciate when you have local copies of your assemblies. So the cloud solution really helps in this. And then what comes around it is the online trainings. So we don't spend that much time actually with our newcomers. We just give them our list of online trainings, and they come out as experts. And this is a great added value.

We do have some challenges though with the Fusion is that the methodology, even though it might be more practical, is often challenging for newcomers. So there is some learning curve due, but this is manageable. And what was maybe also wondering, is how much spread Fusion is, especially in the business sphere, and where do you make this available at the engineering schools.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Yeah, I think that's a great point. Obviously, we would want engineers to already come out of school knowing how to use our software. And we do have a big educational team that takes care of exactly that, where they will make sure that Fusion is used in the curriculum of different engineering schools. Of course, that's not the case at all schools. And it probably also depends on the region where that is available. But it's a great point.

Speaking about this, in fact, Autodesk has the philosophy to make its software available for free for students, for apprentices, for educational institutions in general. So everyone has access to the software, and they come out of their education prepared.

I know that one major point, of course, and you being part of the PLM team is the possibility to manage changes. And for this, you've already mentioned a couple of times the Manage extension. So maybe you can just give us a brief overview of how you use the Manage extension functionality to have out-of-the-box PLM and PDM.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: Yeah. So the Fusion Manage extension was a perfect fit for us because we had strict requirements, but we didn't have that many. And with Fusion Manage, we could actually do everything we wanted also on the cloud based. And so what we do is we release our components and drawings to freeze them. So the production knows what to build. What's the latest and greatest design? What's the latest and greatest assembly?

And within that release, we also have a life cycle. That means that we release things for prototyping. This means that, yes, we will order some components, but not in large quantities. And once we have tested those, we change the life cycle to series release. I think this is a great added value, especially for manufacturing. If there are some revisions that are on series release, then that's what they should be using. Even though there is a prototype release above it.

And the visibility then on the Fusion side is great, and the release process, we have our checklist that you need to do all your due diligence. But it's really fast.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: Yeah. I think you've touched on so many points and we really don't need to delve any further. But yeah, seeing that you're working in a highly regulated industry, like aerospace, obviously you need to have this traceability, not just of your engineering challenges, but also of the processes that you perform. So it's great to see that you're using these functionalities, and it wasn't a big challenge to get you working with the system because it just all works out of the box. There's no implementation necessary.

And as you mentioned, even when you have new on-boarders, you have all of your processes, et cetera, documented. So it's very easy to get them on board. And I think you're already making incredible use of this technology. You actually mentioned this quote to me, "Don't fear the release." I thought it was a cool story. Just tell us about that.

ALEXANDER LEMUS: I just remember my previous companies, to release something was a big ceremony because it's so much work. And if you miss something, then you need to redo all of your work over and again. So you take your time. And this actually slows down your development processes. I always tell the newcomers, don't fear the release. If you miss a tolerance on your release drawing, just put it in and release it in the same day. It doesn't add that much time. It's fast. And what's most important to me is I don't want any improved designs laying around that are not released, and not used in the next produced aircraft.

So we cycle through designs very fast and with an accelerated release process. And losing the fear of it, it just makes us really fast. And almost all aircrafts, every new aircraft, is a little bit newer, a little bit better than the previous one.

JONATHAN GEFFEN: And what you mentioned about this fast iteration of releases really brings us also to the next point of manufacturing and the iteration that you can accomplish with what is possible in Fusion as a platform for not just design, but also the manufacturing area. So you've told me before that you use Fusion for also the rapid iterative improvement, because you're using the CAM technology. And in fact, that's how you started using Fusion, using it for 3D printing of models and of prototypes.

You also use it to actually program your CNC router table. And you utilize for that the nesting functionality to make use of the carbon fiber stock that you use, because obviously you want to reduce the amount of material that you use and be efficient and effective with that. So we can see here how you have several different plates that need to be manufactured. These are all flat, and made of the same material.