Hegemi vs. Duro Labs: Digital Twin for Manufacturing or PLM for Design?

Choosing a system of record for your hardware is a critical decision, but not all platforms are built on the same foundation. While many tools manage Bills of Materials (BOMs), their core philosophies dictate their strengths and weaknesses. The choice between a system like Duro Labs and Hegemi is a choice between two different worldviews: one centered on controlling the design, and one centered on tracking the physical product.

Duro offers a robust, traditional Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution focused on governing the engineering design process. Hegemi, in contrast, provides an instance-centric platform for creating a high-fidelity digital twin of every physical unit you build, track, and maintain. Understanding this distinction is key to choosing the right tool for your team.

The Duro Labs Approach: The Design-Centric PLM

Duro is built around the principles of traditional PLM, providing strong governance for engineering teams. Its workflow is centered on managing the evolution of a product's definition through a formal, auditable process.

Key concepts in Duro include:

• Formal Lifecycles: Products move through enforced stages like Design, Prototype, and Production. This is a familiar and valuable workflow for teams that need strict process gates.
• Change Orders: To advance a product's lifecycle or modify a released design, a formal Change Order (ECO, MCO, DCO) is required. This creates a rigorous approval trail, which is essential for compliance and quality control in many organizations.
• Deep CAD Integrations: Duro's primary strength is its suite of native plugins for tools like Altium, SolidWorks, Onshape, and NX. This allows engineers to remain in their native CAD environment while pulling part numbers and releasing designs directly into the PLM.
• Broad Ecosystem: With integrations for ERP (NetSuite), project management (Jira, Slack), and manufacturing execution systems (MES), Duro can serve as a central hub connecting engineering to the broader business.

Who is Duro for? Duro is an excellent fit for organizations where the primary challenge is managing the engineering design process itself. If your company requires strict, formalized change control, has a large engineering team living in CAD, and needs to integrate with a wide array of existing enterprise software, Duro provides a powerful, design-centric solution.

The Hegemi Approach: The Instance-Centric Digital Twin

Hegemi is built on a different premise. While it manages BOMs and revisions, its core focus is creating a digital twin—a complete, granular history of every single physical unit you manufacture. The central object isn't the design revision; it's the serialized instance.

This instance-centric model provides unique capabilities:

• Granular Event History: Hegemi creates a full, attributable event log for every component on every serialized build. You can see precisely who installed, removed, or swapped a specific part on a specific unit, and when. This high-fidelity history is invaluable for complex assembly, quality control, maintenance, and fleet management.
• Advanced Inventory Analysis: Hegemi's Inventory Analysis tool allows you to simulate production runs. You can define a build set of hypothetical or in-progress units, and the system calculates exactly what parts are missing from your inventory. It then groups shortages by vendor to generate purchase orders, transforming procurement from a reactive task to a proactive planning exercise.
• Deliverables for Order Fulfillment: A Deliverable in Hegemi is a container for a customer order. It groups the specific instances to be shipped, tracks their build completion status, and aggregates all procurement costs from linked purchase orders. This provides a clear, real-time view of order profitability and readiness.
• Visual Dashboards: Features like Gantt-style activity histograms and recursive completion status graphs give you an immediate, at-a-glance understanding of where work is happening and how close your builds are to completion.

Who is Hegemi for? Hegemi is designed for companies where the main challenge lies in the manufacturing, assembly, and post-sale tracking of physical products. It is the superior choice if your business depends on deep visibility into production status, requires high traceability for complex assemblies, manages a fleet of deployed units, or runs on a make-to-order or project basis where tying procurement costs to specific orders is critical.

A Philosophical Difference

Conclusion: Which is Right for You?

Both platforms are powerful tools, but they solve different core problems.

Choose Duro Labs if your organization is built around the engineering department. Your primary need is to enforce a strict, formal process for design changes, your team works exclusively within CAD tools, and you need to plug your product data into a pre-existing enterprise software stack.

Choose Hegemi if your organization is built around manufacturing and operations. Your primary need is deep, real-time visibility into your build process, you assemble complex products requiring end-to-end traceability, or you need sophisticated tools to plan inventory and manage order fulfillment profitably. Hegemi gives you an unparalleled understanding not just of your design, but of what's actually happening on your factory floor and in the field.