OEM&Lieferant Ausgabe 2/2021

88 Digitalization in the mechanical and plant engineering industry How machine builders and plant equipment providers speed up in industry 4.0 By Dr.-Ing. Olaf Sauer, Automation Business Unit/Deputy Institute Director Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB), Karlsruhe The European mechanical and plant engineering industry is successfully equipping manufacturing facilities and factories around the world. For decades now, their brands have been a warranty for the high quality of engineering. It is true, however, that manufacturers of machinery and equipment and their engineers are facing increasing international competition – resulting in the well-known pressure with regard to costs and/or price, time and quality. Secondly, countries look for measures to stabilize their economies. It is evident, that countries with a strong industrial basis will cope better with market uncertainties, even pandemic situations, than countries that focus on service industries only. A strong industrial basis is automatically followed by an industry for equipment and engineering suppliers. If the share of man- ufacturing is decreasing the economy will – over years – also see a decrease of equip- ment manufacturing which also means a loss of expertise in production technology. German industry depends on innovation as we don’t have many natural resources, are a high-wage country and depend on our ex- port strength. Product, process and business model innovation is the key for our economy to sustain welfare and economic strength. Information technology for the mechanical engineering industry of the future Providing highly productive, reliable machin- ery and equipment capable of producing high-quality products on a global scale will not suffice to ensure the business success of the mechanical and industrial engineer- ing sector in the future. Rather, customers tend to purchase benefits, which, in an ex- treme case, might just be the product man- ufactured by the machinery and equipment. Therefore, complimentary services relating to the machine itself are gaining increasing attention. According to a survey performed by ifo institute on behalf of the European Commission, these additional services boost the global competitiveness of the mechanical and plant engineering sector as they add value and thus create jobs for high- ly skilled staff. In addition, services relating to machinery allow for new business mod- els that are less susceptible to variations in sales and investment cycles. Upgrade for machines Of course, information and communica- tion technologies (ICT) are the key to these kinds of new, product-related services. They increasingly penetrate the tradition- al mechanical and industrial engineering sector and open up potentials for innova- tive services. Many suppliers of machinery and equipment, however, are not system- atically prepared for the new ICT-based services yet. Surveys show that less than 10% of mechanical engineering enter- prises have an explicit strategy regarding the Internet-based services they want to establish and enhance. Very few of these enterprises have an appropriate business model in place. Consequently, there is still need for action, particularly because soft- ware will evolve into a full-fledged part of the product portfolio in the future, including the associated challenges ranging from a professional software engineering process, quality assurance for software, models for software maintenance and professional services to the adaption of a sales organi- zation capable of selling ICT products and their benefits. ICT competence is key Fraunhofer is a key partner to machine builders, automation vendors and compo- nent suppliers; with its market leading “Ma- chine and Plant Engineering” it explicitly addresses these companies and develops new processes, manufacturing equipment and control architectures. From the IT point of view, there are many years of experi- ence in the design, development, roll-out and implementation of complex software systems in the manufacturing industry. In a large number of projects for the produc- tion sector, we have repeatedly proved that Bild: © IOSB Dr.-Ing. Olaf Sauer