Centralizing material design with easy access for all users

About the customer

Avient Corporation innovates material solutions that help their customers succeed and enable a sustainable world. Avient’s local touch, customer engagement and global presence allows them to serve customers with agility. They harness the collective strength of 9,000 employees worldwide to collaborate and build on each other’s ideas, innovating solutions that help customers overcome their challenges or capitalize on opportunities provided by the fast-changing world. Avient’s expanding portfolio of offerings includes colorants, advanced composites, functional additives, engineered materials and Dyneema®, the world’s strongest fiber™.

Their challenge

Material data management is a core part of Avient’s business. Developing sustainable, efficient, lightweight designs requires accurate multidomain material properties that are easily available to users on demand.

The Avient Protective Materials team was using inefficient file-based material data management, a legacy of the 2022 acquisition that made them part of the Avient family. They were handling information manually, keeping it in spreadsheets and multiple collaborative web locations spread throughout the company. They needed consolidated reporting instead of trying to manage the sprawl, a centralized database with easy access for all users, including sales, marketing and technical departments.

The solution

The Avient Protective Materials team turned to Siemens to implement a common material database that would be a single source of truth for all their departments and users, woven together by digital thread. To accomplish this, they chose the Simcenter™ Material Data Center software, a comprehensive ecosystem for managing the entire lifecycle of proprietary material data and related information. Simcenter Material Data Center enables organizations to consolidate proprietary data within a secure enterprise workspace, hosted on the Altair One cloud innovation gateway. A common materials database with rolebased access control ensures instant access to approved, revision-controlled material data developed with consistent numerical models. Users can access data sheets and raw data and can generate inputs for simulation on the fly with full traceability back to the supplier source, ensuring valid assumptions and consistency across teams. Each department at Avient Protective Materials can now access their critical material data in a centralized system that enables them to easily find what they’re looking for and ensure data isn’t duplicated or outdated. Simcenter Material Data Center is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and service.

Avient Protective Materials selected Simcenter Material Data Center as a single source of truth for all their
material data.

Results

Consolidated material information management gives Avient Protective Materials enterprise-wide material intelligence from a single source of truth, not only ensuring accuracy and consistency but also easing fulfillment and reporting requirements. A digital thread ties together all the elements of material data throughout the product lifecycle. With Simcenter Material Data Center, it’s easy for team members to access all the information they need and be confident they’re getting the most current documentation, product specification sheets, customer data, product safety information and more.

“Consolidating our material data with Simcenter Material Data Center was a big step forward,” says Albert Vunderink, senior global product coordinator and portfolio manager, Avient Protective Materials. “Instead of handling all the information manually and sharing data with customers by email, now they can log on, see what they purchased and get additional information all in one place.”

Vunderink and his team also appreciate friction-free collaboration with Siemens experts:

“They’re easy to approach and always available.”

Avient will continue to evolve and build on the platform backed by reliable Siemens support.