Herborn, November 28, 2022 - The goals of digital transformation in the industry are clearly defined. It's all about greater transparency, knowledge and speed. With their joint solution for these requirements - implemented at the Rittal plant in Haiger, Central Hesse - Rittal and its sister company German Edge Cloud won the Industry 4.0 Award from ROI-EFESO. The focus: How can modern IIoT technologies in particular be used to align processes in a customer-oriented way, realize efficiency potential and enable new business models? Rittal manufactures up to 8,000 compact enclosures and housings per day in Haiger with 250 highly digitally integrated machines.

Rittal and German Edge Cloud impressed the 30-member jury of renowned industry executives and manufacturing specialists. The jury's decision was based on intensive audits by ROI-EFESO specialists. "Technologies and team spirit are combined in an exemplary manner at the Rittal plant in Haiger. Complete networking from the customer to machine control on the store floor and data-supported learning help the entire company move forward even where conventional automation reaches its limits," said jury member Dr. Jörg Ulrich, Executive Vice President, Head of Operations Region Europe, BSH Hausgeräte GmbH, at the award ceremony: "Overall, Rittal's unique orchestration of employees, machines and data sets new benchmarks for the performance of smart factories."

"We are delighted to receive this award from such an expert jury. It encourages us to view production as an essential driver of the digital integration of the entire company. We are consistently pursuing this path," says Dr. Marc Sesterhenn, Chief Operations Officer at Rittal. "Together with our colleagues from German Edge Cloud, we have succeeded in contextualizing the data in such a way that we now benefit from the new transparency in production on a daily basis," adds Moritz Heide, Head of Digital Operations at Rittal.

In Haiger, German Edge Cloud has implemented a virtual service as part of the ONCITE Digital Production System. The system collects and structures data from a wide range of sources, supplements it with signals, image and sensor data and makes it usable for a cycle of analytics, alerts and live dashboarding: "The detailed visualization of production processes in near real time is a powerful tool for identifying optimization potential to increase overall plant effectiveness," says Dieter Meuser, CEO Digital Industrial Solutions at German Edge Cloud.