The dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of man­u­fac­tur­ing processes in indus­try was the topic of Maik Woj­cieszak from the soft­ware devel­oper wobe-sys­tems GmbH from Kiel. His com­pany is devel­op­ing the new DevOps plat­form “titan” together with Kiel Uni­ver­sity. Other asso­ci­ated part­ners from indus­try – includ­ing HESCH – are involved in this soft­ware project.

The open source sys­tem is designed to make highly inte­grated indus­trial pro­duc­tion processes more trans­par­ent and enable rapid adap­ta­tion to chang­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing con­di­tions. It will be ven­dor-inde­pen­dent and thus can be fur­ther devel­oped by any user. “We want to cre­ate our own hyper­scal­able archi­tec­ture whose build­ing blocks can be changed as needed – and by non-experts,” Woj­cieszak said. The project is funded by the Ger­man Fed­eral Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion and Research and is intended to bring about a fun­da­men­tal change in cul­ture: “Up to now, man­u­fac­tur­ing processes have had to adapt to IT – with “titan” it will be the other way around.”

Niklas Coors, Head of Busi­ness Devel­op­ment at Buschjost GmbH, described to the par­tic­i­pants at the indus­try meet­ing how con­sis­tent mod­u­lar­iza­tion can increase the effi­ciency of man­u­fac­tur­ing processes. Buschjost uses a high num­ber of com­mon parts in the pro­duc­tion of its sole­noid valves for tank sys­tems and was thus able to sig­nif­i­cantly reduce man­u­fac­tur­ing costs. With the help of an online prod­uct con­fig­u­ra­tor, cus­tomers can also put together their own indi­vid­ual tank sys­tem.

Radek Sto­lar from Rit­tal explained in his pre­sen­ta­tion why edge com­put­ing is the pre­req­ui­site for the dig­i­tal fac­tory. The com­pany is known as a con­trol cab­i­net builder, but now gen­er­ates a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of its sales from the devel­op­ment and man­u­fac­ture of data cen­ters. Edge com­put­ing refers to local data cen­ters that are directly attached to a company’s man­u­fac­tur­ing oper­a­tions. “They’re the only ones that pro­vide the latency required by a pro­duc­tion line auto­mated with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence,” Sto­lar said. “Exist­ing data cen­ters don’t have the capac­ity to sup­port real-time data trans­mis­sion via the 5G stan­dard.” Large data cen­ter oper­a­tors such as Google or Ama­zon would also not have the mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing exper­tise that exists in Ger­many. “This is a great oppor­tu­nity for Ger­man com­pa­nies,” Sto­lar is con­vinced.

HESCH’s “All around fil­tra­tion” con­fer­ence pro­vided atten­dees with plenty of valu­able insider infor­ma­tion on the industry’s trend­ing top­ics. Due to the great suc­cess, the series is pho­to­copied. The next event will take place in south­ern Ger­many.