Automation Giant Siemens Offers New Solutions To Help Any Size Business Start On Industry 4.0

For several years now there’s been a tremendous amount of hype about Industry 4.0–the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or 4IR for short, in which smart, autonomous technology revolutionizes the automation and monitoring of whole supply chains, including business processes, to deliver breakthroughs in manufacturing through widespread digitalization.

There have been some shining examples, too, such as the Lighthouse Factories designated by the World Economic Forum. But for a great many companies, there’s been far more hype than actual progress in their businesses.

Now Siemens Digital Industries is rolling out new tools the company thinks will make 4IR more accessible.

Siemen AG is the biggest industrial software company in the world. As of last September, the company had about 311,000 employees, and generated annual revenue of €72.0 billion, with a net income of €4.4 billion. Siemens Digital Industries, one of nine business groups within Siemens, is its industrial controls, industrial software and automation division. “When it comes to PLCs [the computerized brains of the machines in industry], every third machine in the world is a Siemens machine,” said Cedrik Neike, CEO of Siemens Digital Industries and Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG.

The company recently announced two new offerings. The first is Industrial Operations X, part of a Siemens Xcelerator, their new open digital business platform. Industrial Operations X is a toolbox of various digital tools, IoT enable hardware, and services aimed at helping industrial companies analyze data, automate tasks, and optimize operations, ultimately leading to cost savings and improved performance. The second is a collaboration with Microsoft that integrates the Siemens Teamcenter product lifecycle management software with the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform to use AI-powered technology to enhance factory automation, problem reporting and visual inspection.

For Neike, it’s been a long time coming. “I think that Industry 4.0, which is one of the buzzwords in industry that was launched more than 11 years ago at Hanover Messe [the annual giant German industrial expo], I have a feeling that Industry 4.0 is finally happening,” he said. “It’s a bit like hitting a ketchup bottle at the back, everything comes out at the same time. And the reasons are pretty clear–this is a lot of geopolitics. There’s a lot of reshoring and nearshoring and friend-shoring which is happening, a lot of sustainability–we need to be more sustainable in the things we do, and of course workforce shortages. In the G7, ’22 was the first year there were more people leaving the workforce than entering the workforce. And that basically means we need more automation to be able to make that happen.”

A big focus for Siemens, which has always been a top resource for large corporations, has been to make its digitalization products accessible to producers of all sizes. They’re now actively pursuing the opportunities that small and medium-sized manufacturers represent. “We took all of the software we had and all of the automation and modularized it, so you can pick and play–instead of building and buying a monolith, you can take exactly the microservices which you need on the hardware side and on the software side and plugging them together,” Neike explained. “You can start at a certain part, you’re not locked in–you can take a Siemens element, [and one] from somebody else, a competitor, and plug them together. You might be a small to medium company and you can’t afford a couple of those elements, you might take them out of the cloud. This flexibility is super, super-important.”

John Glenski, President of Cincinnati’s Automation Plus, a Salas O Brien Company, whose focus is on Smart Manufacturing solutions for industrial clients, sees the sense behind that approach. “Providing modular solutions, to address various entry price points, has been one of the challenges for solution providers driving 4IR forward,” he said. “We have seen that challenge with our clients and price flexibility in the implementation of 4IR elements is critical to our partners as they progress in their digital journey.”

Another focus area for Siemens has been bringing older technologies into the more modern world of programming and digitalization. “Everybody loves IT, but it actually runs on OT, Operational Technology… everything is being produced running on OT and we have to make sure that these two worlds connect in a much, much better way,” Neike said. “So for example, we said, ‘We have this amazing PLC running at the moment. Why not virtualize it? Why does it have to be a box which sits on the shop floor?’ So we’re going to show, basically, the virtualization of the PLC, making something out of the OT world part of the IT world.”

Similarly, older programming methods are being modernized to be more accessible to younger skilled workers. “Another example is, for years and years, people have been trained to program manufacturing lines in very different languages,” said Neike. “Today a lot of developers are coming out of the IT space, so we want to give them modern programing tools. We’re making those two worlds blur much more. Let’s simplify the way we program a production line.”

Digital twins for both products and processes are an integral part of the Siemens software products. Neike gave the example of the company’s work with Daimler Truck, which uses Siemens software in product design for the trucks themselves, and in designing the factory in which the trucks are made. “They would use our software to design the truck. They would then use our software to be able to say, ‘What are the different bills of materials we I need?’ They would simulate things what would happen when there’s rain. They would then use that data to say, ‘What happens when I want to build this truck?’ They would then basically design the whole production line–people, robots, what needs to happen, how do they need to interact. And then they would build the digital twin not only of the product, but also the digital twin of the production. The production then would talk back to those twins, and say, ‘This is changing,’ so every truck you build would become better than the truck before it because every mistake gets captured, gets put back into the design–you can optimize it.”

Related to that is the company’s concept of the Industrial Metaverse, in which whole factories can be simulated and optimized before they’re built. Anyone with any experience starting up a new manufacturing plant will realize the enormous savings in time, money, and human frustration that being able to optimize a plant’s design and the operation of its production systems before you even break ground for it could bring. “That’s where the Industrial Metaverse really helps,” said Neike. “It helps you avoid wastage by completely simulating it in the digital world.”

For Neike, digitalization is fast becoming a business imperative. “If Covid taught us anything, it’s that the companies that were digital and resilient and flexible survived Covid much, much better than the others. My take is this: take your biggest problem, use digital building blocks to solve it, but then think about, ‘What’s the next problem? The next problem?’ and how can you daisy-chain them so you really build not a lot of digital islands, but a digital continent–an ecosystem.”