Closing the Skills Gap: Why AI-Driven Manufacturing Simulation is a Design Engineer’s Best Friend

Key Takeaways:

• New hires in engineering and procurement lack critical manufacturing knowledge, and most have yet to set foot in a manufacturing facility. How can they effectively design and procure parts with suppliers?
• Digital Factories can help engineering and procurement accelerate their understanding of the manufacturing production process, and significantly reduce the knowledge gap left by more experienced workers who have left the workforce

The Full Article

The World Economic Forum noted that the automotive, aerospace, supply chain, and transportation industries were among the top ten that want to increase AI and big data skill requirements between 2025 and 2030. This substantiates the importance of leveraging more advanced technologies to educate and train the labor force in the technical skills that will ensure innovation and economic growth.

Solutions like aPriori address the lack of manufacturing floor experience among new engineering and procurement teams by creating virtual training environments. Manufacturers save time and money by training new engineering and procurement teams more efficiently and thoroughly with such solutions. And meet the needs of those who are not logistically able to visit a physical facility.

Today’s Skills Gap Contributors

When key employees leave, taking their years of knowledge and experience with them, the logical next step is to replace them. Often, their positions are filled by less proficient team members from engineering and procurement.

In an ideal world, you would take your time training them and imparting the knowledge that typically takes years to acquire. But today’s competitive market moves at warp speed. Manufacturers do not have the luxury of time. As a result, many are left with a deficit in their institutional knowledge and must find a way to compensate for it through accelerated, thorough onboarding and training that not only provides critical data but offers a virtual experience that replicates the hands-on one of a physical factory or the intimate knowledge gained through years-long supplier and vendor relationships.

These deficits can be attributed to:

1. Skills Gaps: Many of today’s manufacturing roles necessitate advanced skills in data analysis. However, the current workforce lacks sufficient training in these areas. As a result, a deficit exists between the number of available jobs and the number of qualified candidates.
2. Insufficient/No Production Floor Experience: In order to perform their jobs effectively, engineering and procurement new hires need manufacturing floor and supplier facility experience. However, limited proximity and time do not allow for hands-on production training and education that would enable a deeper understanding of the mechanics of manufacturing engineering and procurement.
3. Demographic Changes: The mass exodus of retiring Baby Boomers has created a gap in experienced, highly trained workers, leading to a shortage. Those Baby Boomers often take an expansive amount of knowledge and experience with them as they retire. There is a significant gap between the skilled workforce who left and those who often lack the skills needed to compensate for the loss of more experienced workers. How can manufacturers ensure that new workers can acquire that institutional knowledge and experience, getting up to speed quickly and thoroughly?

Engineers and procurement professionals new to the workforce enter with specific knowledge about their chosen fields. However, they often lack the necessary “boots on the ground” manufacturing experience to ensure that they can optimize product design and procure the most appropriate, cost-effective supplies – as efficiently as possible.

Close Skills Gaps With Strategies & aPriori

To mitigate gaps and shortfalls, manufacturers are investing in training programs, automation, and upskilling initiatives to prepare workers for modern manufacturing roles. aPriori accelerates the process of acquiring years of institutional and manufacturing floor knowledge.

aPriori’s AI-powered manufacturing insights and cost management platform addresses the manufacturing skills gap and labor shortages by effectively democratizing manufacturing knowledge and automating complex analysis. The core capability is to simulate the design-for-manufacturability (DFM) and cost implications of a product before it’s even built. This means that less experienced engineers, designers, and sourcing professionals can instantly access the expertise that would traditionally require years of on-the-job experience from a skilled veteran.

By highlighting potential manufacturing issues and providing optimized alternatives, aPriori acts as a virtual mentor, embedding expert knowledge directly into the product development process. This significantly reduces the reliance on a shrinking pool of highly specialized, skilled labor for early-stage design reviews and cost estimation, accelerating time-to-market while maintaining quality.

The Digital Twin: A New Hire’s Best Teacher

aPriori’s ability to create a Digital Twin of the Manufacturing Process helps companies retain institutional knowledge and streamline operations, even in the face of high turnover or labor shortages.

The most critical loss when experienced workers leave is that they take their years of hard-earned institutional (or tribal) knowledge with them. This knowledge often encompasses collective expertise, memory, and undocumented know-how regarding an organization’s products, processes, and operations. Unlike explicit knowledge, which is easily documented in the form of standard operating procedures, manuals, and policies, tacit knowledge encompasses undocumented skills, tricks of the trade, and intuition gained from years of experience. Tacit knowledge is simultaneously the most valuable asset and the most difficult to replace.

Two examples of tacit knowledge and its impact when it is gone are as follows:

1. Increased Errors and Quality Control Issues in Product Development: A quality control technician knows the subtle visual cues on a finished product that indicate a hidden defect not caught by standard sensors or formal checks. Without this expertise, defective products may reach customers, resulting in costly recalls, warranty claims, and damage to the brand’s reputation.
2. Loss of Critical Supplier/Vendor History: A purchasing manager leaves, taking their personal history of relationships and negotiations with key materials suppliers. The remaining team may lose access to crucial information, such as a supplier’s true lead times, unstated pricing flexibility, or the identification of an alternative supplier in the event of a crisis, potentially leading to increased material costs or production stops.

aPriori’s solution contains detailed digital factories representing various manufacturing processes (e.g., machining, casting, injection molding) across different geographic regions. When a key manufacturing engineer retires or leaves, their critical, process-specific knowledge doesn’t vanish; it is effectively contained within the aPriori platform’s rules and cost models. This enables newer employees to quickly grasp optimal material choices, process sequences, and geographic sourcing strategies by running simulations, rather than learning through costly and time-consuming trial and error on the shop floor.

By quantifying the financial and manufacturability impacts of design changes, aPriori not only improves efficiency but also serves as a robust onboarding and training tool, lowering the barrier to entry for new talent and mitigating the severe impact of the ongoing skills and labor crisis.

aPriori compensates for the manufacturing skills gap by automating complex, experience-driven analysis and democratizing institutional manufacturing knowledge across the product development lifecycle through:

1. Knowledge Democratization and Accelerated Upskilling

aPriori’s core capability is to embed expert manufacturing knowledge directly into the design process, making it immediately accessible to less experienced personnel.

Here’s how:

• Virtual Manufacturing Guidance: By instantly simulating the manufacturability and cost of a design using Digital Factories (virtual representations of real-world production processes), the platform provides automated Design for Manufacturability (DFM) and Design for Cost (DFC) guidance. This essentially provides a junior engineer with the real-time insights of a seasoned manufacturing expert, significantly accelerating their learning curve and reducing their reliance on a scarce pool of senior engineers.
• Codified Institutional Knowledge: The Digital Factories contain codified knowledge about machine capabilities, process constraints, cycle times, and regional labor/material costs. When a senior expert retires, their extensive process-specific experience is preserved within the platform’s rules and algorithms, preventing the loss of institutional knowledge.
• Standardized Training: The platform serves as a common language and data source across design, cost engineering, and sourcing teams, ensuring that new hires are trained on standardized, data-driven principles for cost and manufacturability, replacing subjective and manual methods.
• Enhanced, Real-Time Collaboration: aP Workspace Insight Collaboration is an integrated review and edit capability for all stakeholders on the 3D model. Now, all stakeholder teams can collaborate seamlessly and refine a product based on immediate, centralized insights into carbon, cost, and manufacturability. Tag a colleague for input and share your assumptions and analysis to further improve product optimization.

2. Automation of Time-Consuming Tasks

By automating key analysis steps, aPriori frees up the limited time of highly skilled workers to focus on innovation and complex problem-solving.

Here’s how:

• Automated Cost and Manufacturability Analysis: The platform automates the time-consuming process of estimating “should cost” and identifying manufacturing risks directly from the 3D CAD model. This replaces the need for skilled cost engineers and manufacturing personnel to manually analyze every single part.
• Reduced Design Rework (Churn): By catching manufacturing and cost issues early in the design phase—before designs are finalized and released—aPriori drastically reduces the need for late-stage Engineering Change Orders (ECOs). This is critical because fixing issues at the end of the cycle demands significant time from the most skilled, high-value engineers.

3. Support for Strategic Sourcing and Supply Chain Resilience

In the face of labor and skills shortages globally, aPriori helps teams make smarter sourcing decisions without deep local expertise.

Here’s how:

• Global Manufacturing Intelligence: The Digital Factories include manufacturing process models for various regions and production methods worldwide. This allows sourcing teams to quickly and accurately compare the cost and feasibility of manufacturing a part in different geographies or with different processes.
• Fact-Based Negotiation: Providing detailed, data-driven “should costs” gives procurement teams a solid foundation for negotiations, compensating for a lack of personal, experiential knowledge about supplier costs and manufacturing limitations.

Accelerated Training Leads to More Innovation

As AI-assistant technology advances, it’s revolutionizing manufacturing. New hires become proficient faster, and seasoned engineers can dedicate their expertise to breakthrough innovations.

Now, all workers are equipped with valuable new tools. As a result, there is increased factory resilience, ensuring US production lines maintain a strong competitive advantage and continue to thrive.