AdvancedManufacturing.org
happen if the recipe of, let’s say, a pharmaceutical prod- uct is changed and the change is not recognized? This would be a disaster for the company. We have to do much more work on offering secure
systems and finding the right solutions to prevent hack- ers from the outside—couch hackers, as well as very professional hackers sometimes even supported by gov- ernments—from intruding into our systems and changing things. I think we are just at the beginning of recognizing what still has to be done.
What else would make the transition to smart manu-
facturing smoother and faster? First of all, we definitely need international cooperation.
We are all living and competing on the world market. But we also have different strengths and weaknesses. Stronger collaboration would really help everyone. This is why our SmartFactory association is so successful:
We bring together different players with different competen- cies. Some of them are competitors, but within our setup, they are willing to cooperate. We treat our partners as puzzle pieces with different competencies, and if you put all these puzzle pieces together, you get the big picture that will be seen from the outside as one good source of information and products. It will help if we move forward in this way. We also have to be aware of the impact on labor, espe- cially as we move into a more IT-driven world. We need more people with knowledge of IT—even more
than they had before. There is a demand for people trained in mechatronics, and we have to train a lot of people in this field so they can play an active role in this world. It will only succeed if we convince our workers that this the right way to move forward. I know what happened in the '80s when we talked about integrated manufacturing and factories with no people working in them. This idea was complete nonsense and created a lot of problems, and I think that has been recognized: Since then, we have talked about real human-machine collaboration and the very valu- able role of the worker in the factories—because this future world will be a very flexible world in which a lot of unfore- seen problems will suddenly come up. Only the human being, with his creativity, is able to solve these problems.
At Industry of Things World in Berlin in September,
you said reshoring will happen in large part because peo- ple are going to get much more demanding about quick delivery of products—which you have reiterated here. Are you seeing examples of that already?
We see a lot of examples, especially here in the Europe-
an area. We have a lot of companies bringing production back from China—perhaps not directly into Germany, as a high-tech and high-wages country, but into areas around us, where labor is a bit cheaper but where there is still a very good, educated staff available. We have worldwide examples for reshoring. The Adidas Speedfactory is one. Making shoes will, perhaps, in the future take place on the backside of the store: You order your shoes at the front desk, have a coffee and come back to pick up your person- ally designed shoes two hours later. They are 3D printed right in the back of the shop. Especially, high-value products and production will
quickly come back to the markets where the customers are located. And we will see it come up very quickly.
What’s the best way for smaller and medium-size en-
terprises to work to transition to smart manufacturing? Small and medium-size enterprises present a very
interesting question for us. In Europe, our economies rely deeply on small and medium-sized enterprises. So we always have to address the special needs of these compa- nies. This is completely different, for example, from Korea, where they only have the really big enterprises. The German government just installed—and this was
my idea—a so-called network of competence centers for small and medium-size enterprises. The first five centers are operating already. They develop special education, training and support programs that address the needs of these small and medium-size enterprises in the domain of digitization and Industrie 4.0 (IoT). And we learned over the first couple of months that we have to start on a much, much lower level than we expected. We are not preparing the transition from industry 3.5 to 4.0; but we need to start perhaps from 2.5. There is a lot of work still to be done. In the last decade, since the time when we recognized
this movement into lean technologies and lean thinking, many firms have become really lean. As a result, they don’t have people, maybe apart from the owner, who feel responsible for long-term, future strategies. So we first have to bring in people who can recognize what this change means for the company. In this case, we are like an external think tank, creating awareness of the situa- tion, informing the company representatives about new technologies, using our demonstrators to show what is already possible, and offering training for their staff so they can prepare their own people to jump into the race and be successful.
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March 2017
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