AI-Native PLM Solution Accelerates Design

PLM specialist Duro has relaunched its product as Duro Design, rebuilt with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The cloud- and AI-native platform can help manufacturers launch products up to three times faster, according to the company.

“Today’s companies need solutions beyond data storage to enhance decision-making, streamline supply chain management, and accelerate innovation,” said Jon Stevenson, Former GrabCAD VP and Duro Board of Director. “Duro is delivering an AI-native PLM that is accessible and helps manufacturers optimize every stage of the product lifecycle—from concept to production.”

According to the company, Duro Design connects design, supply chain, and manufacturing data through a unified digital thread. The platform replaces legacy PLMs with a cloud- and AI-native system that’s “fast to deploy, easy to configure, and avoids vendor lock-in,” according to Duro. 

“Controlling the digital thread is the next competitive advantage in manufacturing,” said Michael Corr, CEO and co-founder of Duro. “With Duro Design, we’re helping hardware teams move beyond legacy tools by unifying design, sourcing, and manufacturing in one AI-native platform.”

Key capabilities of Duro Design include:

• Enterprise-grade functionality with an intuitive UX: Duro empowers users to find what they need quickly without clicking through dozens of menus, according to the company

• Built-in AI for validations, impact analysis, metadata, and sourcing: Increases accuracy, accelerates design, and reduces costs by surfacing sourcing data directly to engineers.

• No-code configurability via UI wizards, YAML editor, or GraphQL API: No consultants are required. Users can configure part number schemes, workflows, custom fields, and validations in a few clicks.

Additional out-of-the-box features

• CAD plugins for Atium 365, SolidWorks, Onshape, and NX

• Best practice new product introduction (NPI) workflows

• Extendable change order and change request workflows

• Integrations with Netsuite, SAP, Ion, Epsilon3, Fusion by Stoke Space, and more. 

“When Duro started we focused primarily on startups and the SMB market, because we felt that was the most underserved market from legacy tail end providers,” Corr says. “It was a good fit because our product was simple, our customers could move at a faster pace. As we got more mature, we worked with larger mid-market enterprises, and our own customers were moving at an even faster pace than we could keep up with.”

A year ago, the company recognized a window of opportunity where Duro was still nimble enough to do a major refactoring of the product using AI to accelerate the process. “We wanted to not just meet the demands of the market, but to exceed them,” Corr says.

Natural language search helps designers find the parts and assemblies they are looking for much faster. Image courtesy of Duro.

According to Corr, AI is a good fit for PLM workflows because it can analyze data from different sources without having to normalize the data in a single database, as is the case with traditional PLM platforms. “It’s a perfect fit for PLM, and it has lowered the technical barrier to connect bespoke data,” Corr says.

“PLM’s sole purpose is to capture changes and track them,” Corr adds. “All that information is captured in PLM and that is prime content for an AI model to train on. It can learn what changes tend to be rejected or approved, and what changes resulted in failures in the factory. It can build models on those patterns, so any subsequent submitted changes can be analyzed or pre-processed.”

Users can leverage natural language search to find parts and assemblies within the platform, and there is also an AI copilot that can help build out business logic in the customer’s Duro account. “Historically you needed to do some complex interfacing to configure changes or write custom code,” Corr says. “Now with a natural language prompt, you can tell it to add validations or specify that all mechanical parts have to be steel or aluminum. You can build out business logic that follows a company’s rules or workflows, and configure the platform to them. Any user can engage with Duro and configure it to add business logic.”

Duro is already piloting the new platform with new and existing customers. All new customers will launch on the rebuilt Duro Design, with existing customers migrating over as the new platform reaches parity with their existing deployments.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.