Transparency for production

Added to this are energy costs and energy availability as well as sustainability and traceability requirements in the supply chains. In factories, for example, optimization goals have changed rapidly. In the past, the main focus was on achieving the highest possible quantities. Today, the question is: how can I produce an appropriate number of units with the lowest possible energy consumption per unit? Factories are not yet designed for this. In order to deal with all these requirements in Europe, a high degree of digitalization is needed - and at high speed. This requires standardized platform solutions.

What do you think the path to smart manufacturing looks like?

The first step is to create transparency and understand the relationships between the relevant data. Only then can we understand what we can optimize in the first place. Data consistency is one thing, putting the data in the right context is another, especially as digital data models - digital twins - from different areas of production need to be connected. These are created in ecosystems that are often still incompletely networked today: Plant data, product data, manufacturing data.

If you were to push unstructured data from production into an AI engine, the result would be nothing of added value. If, on the other hand, it is possible to create a complete digital twin for systems, products and manufacturing processes and connect them, this is a lever on the way to smart production. This means that we first have to create transparency before we can optimize, even before we think about managing production smartly. This also applies to energy monitoring and, in the long term, energy management in production. The combination of the three twins is needed to place the energy flows in the context of the production processes, to understand them and to use them to create value. In the short term, for example, the aim is to reduce expensive peak loads. In the long term, we need to determine and reduce the product carbon footprint.

What was the focus of your presence at this year's Hannover Messe?

At our stand, visitors were able to see practical examples of how we help our customers to optimize their value chain in the relevant ecosystems. Control, switchgear and machine manufacturers use Eplan and Rittal solutions to create the digital twin of machines and systems and make the data usable during operation. We showed how our customers can increase data consistency around the digital product twin with Cideon. IIoT-supported production management with the Oncite Digital Production System (DPS) then creates transparency for operators about the data of the manufacturing processes, which increases the efficiency and flexibility of production. We also showed how it can work to connect these ecosystems for energy monitoring in production. At the trade fair stand, we also showed a live insight into the energy monitoring of ongoing production in our Smart Production in Haiger.

Here we are our own "Customer Zero" and share our experience and expertise in the Friedhelm Loh Group with our customers. Our conviction and our principle of action is that we understand the processes along our customers' value chains, think in terms of new ecosystems and develop comprehensive, standardized solutions. Of course, there were also the latest innovations that fit seamlessly into our customers' processes and optimize them - such as our Blue e+ enclosure cooling units, which consume 75% less energy on average, or the Wire Terminal, which assembles wires ten times faster. We wanted to talk to visitors to the Hannover Messe about this. In our view, this is the great opportunity of the Hannover Messe as a whole. It brings exhibitors and customers into dialog and, as an overarching industrial trade fair, brings together the key expertise from the relevant sectors to fill the new ecosystems with life. Good examples of this are Catena-X and, in the future, Manufacturing-X.

The questions were asked by Anna Molder, WEKA Fachmedien