“This is nothing less than a paradigm shift in industry: the real manufacturing world is converging with the digital manufacturing world to enable organizations to digitally plan and project the entire lifecycle of products and production facilities.”
- Helmuth Ludwig, CEO, Siemens Industry Sector, North America.
The Technologies of Smart Integration
“The future of smart manufacturing is today,” says Helmuth Ludwig, CEO, Siemens Industry Sector, North America.
“Previously, the industrial value chain, including product design, production planning, production engineering, production execution and services were implemented separately,” he says. “Today, new technologies are bringing these worlds together in exciting ways.”
What has made the Amberg plant so successful, he says, is the integration of three specific critical manufacturing technologies: product lifecycle management (PLM), manufacturing execution systems (MES) and industrial automation.
“Whether you’re producing modern commercial aircraft, fuel-efficient cars or high-performance golf clubs, technology used in PLM, MES and industrial automation are helping manufacturers to realize and achieve top line growth by increasing productivity and minimizing risk,” he explains.
“By leveraging [these] systems, successful companies can focus on aspects like shortening their innovation cycles, getting transparency into their operations, raising individual productivity through knowledge sharing across their organizations and minimizing risk by building in more predictability into dynamic environments,” he adds.
More specifically, notes Raj Batra, president of Siemens Industry’s Automation Division, the future of manufacturing is in finding the perfect junction between these technologies and learning to wield them together as a complete system.
“The real issue is defining all of the meet points between those three technologies so you get the sum of that integrated whole,” he says. “And that is what is driving this major shift in manufacturing efficiency.”
Doing that, he says, requires manufacturers to pull together all of the high-tech tools at their disposal. Which is another trick in itself.
