The digital future began yesterday

In today’s fast-paced business environment, consumers are demanding increasingly customised products, innovation cycles are becoming shorter and competitive pressure is growing. There are, however, numerous opportunities for companies to respond to changing market conditions.

At Digitalize 2017 later this month, Siemens will explore global and local market trends, and look at the ways in which businesses can create efficiencies in time, energy, and resources by harnessing digital technologies that can contribute to higher efficiency: from product design and engineering to production design, commissioning, operation and modernisation of machines and plants.

Digitalisation creates new opportunities to produce more flexibility and satisfy customer-specific requirements individually. The prerequisite, however, lies in integrating processes across the entire life cycle and this starts with digitalisation within the enterprise.

Core components for the digital enterprise

What does this look like? First, a digital enterprise requires industrial software solutions for end-to-end processes – from development to production and services. Moreover, it needs an efficient communications infrastructure for networked data exchange. A digital enterprise also needs reliable security solutions to ensure protection of trade secrets in this networked, online world. Finally, a digital enterprise must offer industrial services that increase its own real net output ratio by means of digitalisation.

Digitalisation makes it possible to merge all stages of the value chain. The first attempts to do so occurred as early as the 1980s, in the form of computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM). Today we have much more powerful methods of capturing, transferring, storing and evaluating large quantities of data. The technological advances have an effect not only on the volume of data (big data) but also on its analysis and practical application (smart data).

Customers drive progress

Technological progress, however, is not the only thing that drives the development of a digital enterprise. End users are instrumental in this development, since they want to be supported on their path towards the digitalisation with the right solutions and products.

It comes as no surprise that short time to market is becoming increasingly important. Achieving this requires holistic, digitalised processes. Furthermore, customer needs are becoming more individual and have to be met flexibly.

Customer targets are now ‘batch size of one’. At Nike, for example, customers can have their names stitched onto their athletic shoes in the factory. In the end, it is about increasing productivity, making more efficient use of human resources and machines, and reducing the consumption of energy and raw materials.

The goal is that the first prototype built is already fit for sale.

This digital approach also stretches to production planning and production engineering, because even production can be completely planned by digital means — all the way to the virtual commissioning of a new plant or an entire factory with all its production processes. This approach may seem obvious, but in practice things can often be very different.

Finally, digitalisation includes all the services that help the organisation achieve maximum productivity, reduce operational costs and generally get the most out of the delivered product. This usually goes hand in hand with new business models and customer relationships.

Learn more at Siemens’ annual digitalisation conference, Digitalize 2017, which will be held in Sydney on Wednesday, 30 August 2017. For registration and more details see https://www.siemensdigitalize2017.com/.