A Siemens report estimates that unplanned downtime costs an average large plant in the surveyed sectors $253 million per year. Whether investigating a failed circuit board or responding to a rush order, factory teams must gather evidence across systems, consult specialists, and coordinate the next step. The data may be available, but turning it into a response takes substantial time and effort.

The NVIDIA Factory Operations Blueprint (FOX) provides a reference architecture for adding a factory manager agent to existing factory systems. Developers connect their existing data and tools, configure specialized agents, and define which decisions require operator review. These agents can monitor operations in real time, identify bottlenecks, investigate the root causes of errors or defects, and orchestrate robot fleets to reduce downtime and improve yield.

Production planning and inspection are two workflows where factory agents can help teams respond to new orders and product designs. At the Siemens Electronics Factory in Erlangen, which produces more than a thousand products a year, frequent changeovers for new products or orders make both tasks important. For rush orders, agents built with the FOX Blueprint and powered by NVIDIA Nemotron run simulations through Siemens Intelligence Center X. These simulations balance costs, existing orders, supply levels, and line setups—without requiring a planner to manually query each system. The end-to-end agentic system can enable cost savings of up to 20%. For new product designs, Siemens is combining its product lifecycle management software and Process Preparation X with NVIDIA Cosmos and NVIDIA Omniverse to generate a virtual prototype and synthetic training data. This helps electronics manufacturers prepare and optimize automated optical inspection (AOI) processes before physical production begins. This virtual production preparation can reduce time to market by up to 40%.