Dhe orders are by way of the roof and the books are full to the brim. Clients are queuing as a result of the world wants extra {hardware} and extra software program, extra robots, extra machines, factories and extra fashionable companies. Cedrik Neike says that there isn’t a different method to get the urgent issues of the time below management. The Siemens board speaks of local weather change and the corona pandemic, warmth waves in India, the looming penalties of the conflict in Ukraine, and damaged provide and provide chains. Dramatic occasions with far-reaching upheavals – and a glimmer of hope on the horizon: expertise. Neike is for certain: “There will likely be a second manufacturing facility increase, however it is going to be totally different.”
The corona pandemic lastly confirmed corporations everywhere in the world the bounds of globalization and thus the limitless availability of supplies and uncooked supplies. On the similar time, it’s changing into more and more tough for western nations to discover workers for the bodily demanding and infrequently monotonous work, which is able to additional speed up automation within the manufacturing facility halls – additionally to management prices.
Neike compares the present change with a ketchup bottle, the underside of which one faucets in useless to get the purple sauce out. “It is a bit the identical now: Little has occurred in ten years, and now everyone wants to catch up,” he says. All indicators level to a golden age of automation. Neike ought to know, since he’s liable for the necessary industrial enterprise of the long-established Munich group Siemens, which had gross sales of greater than 16 billion euros within the final fiscal yr alone. What as soon as started with robots within the factories of plane and automotive producers is now going down in virtually each different trade: from prescription drugs to agriculture.
“It may well’t go on as earlier than,” he says sooner or later in the course of a one-hour video interview with the FAZ. The planet is slowly dying. New pondering is required. The outdated shopper and throwaway society is over. Manufacturing is more and more going down nearer to the shopper. “If parts are despatched around the globe 3 times, then that does not save assets,” he says. Recycling, financial savings and sustainability are the order of the day. Similar to within the manufacturing facility of the Swedish battery start-up and Siemens accomplice Northvolt. There, as well as to the manufacturing plant, a recycling line had additionally been erected – for the reuse of supplies that have been really worn out. Up to now they’d most likely have been disposed of instantly. At present they’re damaged down into their particular person parts, processed and reused in manufacturing. round economic system.
Neike speaks of round industries. They wanted new processes and procedures, machines and applied sciences. The occasions when essentially the most fashionable factories nonetheless had chimneys are lengthy gone. At present we work with “inexperienced electrical energy”, the manufacturing facility buildings are glowing clear, filled with machines and abandoned.
He was simply in Milan, says Neike. There he noticed a really particular manufacturing facility. Up to now they’d have been referred to as greenhouses, at present we communicate of vertical farming, i.e. umpteen beds which are organized one above the opposite as a substitute of horizontally and meet essentially the most fashionable ecological and industrial standards. Heads of lettuce do not simply develop there, they’re really produced. Such farms expend to 90 % much less water and 70 % much less fertilizer per hectare in contrast to typical fields, however use quite a lot of laptop expertise. The result’s superb, one of many heads of lettuce has simply as many nutritional vitamins as a kiwi. Breeding and expertise make it attainable.
Siemens provides the instruments for this. Packages and machines, programs and processes, computer-aided design and processing, CAD and CAM. They equip 1000’s of factories around the globe with it yearly. Halls with machines that truly serve themselves. As if by magic, they’ll management and regulate, change and regulate themselves. Neike is already letting machines speak to machines in what is called the Web of Issues. Siemens developed its personal language for this, made it a norm and a normal, and launched it globally. Within the discipline of machine management and automation, Siemens is among the main teams on this planet.
On this method, engineers and programmers can de facto mirror the true world on their calculators and computer systems, give it a digital picture, create an ideal copy in bits and bytes. On this method, a digital twin could be positioned subsequent to each factor. It’s then introduced to life with a couple of mouse clicks, state-of-the-art machines and networked factories. “There are round 190,000 patent functions in Europe yearly,” says Neike. “We’re among the many high 5 with Siemens.” The decisive process now could be to join every part with every part, a sort of metaverse for the trade. For what purpose? To bridge the hole between the digital and actual worlds, ship customized work at trade costs and serve prospects completely.
“We’ve got this new manufacturing facility in Nanjing, China,” says Neike. One of the fashionable engine factories on this planet. It was first designed as a digital twin, then developed completely within the Metaverse and at last constructed on website. “And we’ve got the opposite manufacturing facility in Amberg,” he says. A constructing from the Seventies, consistently up to date and most not too long ago made into the counterpart of the printed circuit board manufacturing facility in Chengdu, China. Twin factories producing printed circuit boards. Separated from one another by 1000’s of kilometers, they really work in parallel. 75 % of the manufacturing is automated, there are virtually no errors in manufacturing.
