In this edition of the “Meet the Visionary” series, we explore Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) through the lens of Joe Bohman, Executive Vice President of PLM (product lifecycle management) Products at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Joe’s leadership is driving the integration of OpenUSD into industrial workflows, helping to bridge the gap between physical and virtual worlds at a scale previously unimaginable.
From Silos to a Unified Vision
With over 30 years in the industry, Joe has witnessed first-hand the persistent challenges manufacturers face: siloed data, fragmented tools, and a lack of live visibility into product and production processes. At Siemens, he’s leading efforts to change that by embedding OpenUSD, NVIDIA Omniverse APIs, and accelerated computing into the Teamcenter X ecosystem and the Siemens Xcelerator platform.
By integrating OpenUSD into Teamcenter, Siemens enables its customers to consolidate disaggregated product datasets into a unified, photorealistic, and interactive visualization of both their products and factories. This shift is a game-changer for customers managing product data at an industrial scale.
“OpenUSD is helping us realize our vision of a comprehensive digital twin that brings the real and virtual worlds together,” Joe explains. “It’s becoming a foundational element for building what we call the Industrial Metaverse.”
Joe leads the PLM portfolio at Siemens, helping steer the company’s long-term strategy and digital transformation journey. Under his guidance, OpenUSD has emerged as a cornerstone standard within Siemens’ vision for an industrial metaverse—one that allows for a comprehensive digital twin of both products and production systems.
“Core in that vision is a comprehensive digital twin,” Joe continues. “OpenUSD is a very powerful vehicle that allows us to help our customers realize that digital twin.”
The Power of OpenUSD: Enabling Industrial-Grade Visualization
One of the key challenges that led Siemens to adopt OpenUSD was the need to handle complex industrial data at an unprecedented scale. “We were really struggling with the ability to see and interact with products in production above 100,000 BOM lines,” Joe reveals. “With OpenUSD and RTX, it doesn’t matter if it’s a million BOM lines or 10 million BOM lines—the performance stays there, the fidelity stays there.”
This capability has proven transformative. Customers can now visualize products and production processes in real time with unprecedented fidelity. “Last year, we showed the HD Hyundai LNG tanker with ~1 million BOM lines. This year, we showcased the Maserati with beautiful CFD [Computational Fluid Dynamics] visualization,” Joe shares. “It’s almost magical.”
Powering the Executable Digital Twin
At the heart of Siemens’ work with OpenUSD is the executable digital twin—a dynamic, interactive simulation of a product or factory. Through this, Siemens’ customers can not only see their full operations, but also simulate and query them.
Joe frames it as a three-part approach: “See it, try it, ask it.
- See it: Visualize your entire factory or product, even before it exists.
- Try it: Simulate performance and optimize decisions.
- Ask it: Use AI to predict behavior, solve problems, and train workers.
By integrating OpenUSD capabilities into its Siemens Xcelerator platform applications, starting with Teamcenter X software, Siemens is enabling powerful new workflows that bridge previously disconnected domains. “One of the most common problems I see in customers is difficulty connecting engineering to manufacturing,” Joe explains. “OpenUSD allows us to collapse fragmented tool chains and help our customers save cost and go faster.”
This is especially impactful in areas like CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics—the simulation of how air and liquids flow around objects) and PLM, which have traditionally operated in separate silos. Joe explains: “What we’re realizing is a single experience for our customers where different engineering and manufacturing functions come together in one environment.”
Accelerating Innovation and Workforce Readiness
Joe notes that the pace of change in the industry is accelerating. “I’ve never seen the pace of change at the level that it’s at now,” he says. “Things are changing very quickly for our customers in terms of what they build, and the technologies used to build it.”
In this dynamic environment, OpenUSD is helping Siemens customers adapt and innovate faster. By collapsing disjointed systems into unified workflows, OpenUSD is enabling faster time-to-market and greater operational agility. “The customers that move the fastest are going to be the most successful,” Joe asserts. “What we’re doing together, including with Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), really helps to propel that forward.”
Looking ahead, Joe also sees OpenUSD playing a role in solving workforce development challenges. “We’re working with customers building multiple factories in the U.S. who are facing a shortage of skilled technicians,” he explains. “The industrial metaverse, integrated into AR/VR systems, will help train the next generation of workers. That’s going to be super critical.”
Building for Security and Scale
For industrial applications, security is paramount. Siemens has ensured that its implementation of OpenUSD respects and enhances their security model. “Teamcenter is known as the most secure PLM on the planet,” Joe states. “One of the things we enjoy about OpenUSD is our ability to have OpenUSD respect and honor and participate with that Teamcenter security model.”
Shaping the Standard
As a member of the AOUSD, Siemens is not just adopting the technology, they’re helping shape it. From ensuring JT format interoperability to advancing OpenUSD’s support for configuration management, Siemens is contributing to making OpenUSD ready for industrial-scale use.
“(Working with) AOUSD and the fact that we’re able to shape it is important to us,” Joe explains. “The ability to have OpenUSD talk to JT as a first-class citizen within OpenUSD was very important to us, since JT is an industry standard format for visualization and PLM.”
Looking Ahead
Joe believes we’re just beginning to see what’s possible with OpenUSD. From real-time factory simulations to AI-enhanced operations, the future is about unifying complex engineering, design, and manufacturing data into a single experience.
“Everything comes together: mechanical, electrical, software, simulation, and manufacturing,” Joe says. “The end-to-end process becomes faster, more agile, and more intelligent. That’s the power of OpenUSD in the industrial metaverse.”
As we continue our “Meet the Visionary” series, Joe’s insights offer a compelling glimpse into how OpenUSD is transforming industrial workflows and enabling the industrial metaverse. His leadership at Siemens is helping to bridge the physical and digital worlds, creating new possibilities for collaboration, innovation, and efficiency across industries.
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