Text Ulrich Sendler, Steffen Maltzan, Dr. Carola Hilbrand ––– Photography
Mr. Seitz, change is happening everywhere. The climate crisis, energy supplies, supply chains and diverging global trade – nothing is unaffected. How is industry to cope with that?
Sebastian Seitz: Globalisation led many of us to believe that everything was available in unlimited abundance. The past few years have shown that to be a naive view. Industry needs to achieve a fundamental transformation at a time when, in many parts of the world, it is getting increasingly difficult to find people with the necessary skills. The only solution is to incorporate extensive automation into planning, building and manufacturing processes. That means industry is part of the solution. The energy transition is a particularly good example of this. Electrical energy will replace other types of energy, and electricity networks are having to cope with much bigger loads and fluctuations. New infrastructure is urgently needed. Nonetheless, the days when sufficiently low-cost energy was available around the clock for industrial requirements are long gone. That poses a challenge for manufacturing businesses. It’s not just about boosting efficiency by a couple of percent. It’s about achieving a whole new level of energy management – even as far as organising high-consumption processes on a flexible basis in line with the availability of energy or a sliding scale of costs. For that, you need not just the right infrastructure but also the right software architecture – the data infrastructure for digitalising processes, making dataflows transparent and managing those dataflows. At the Friedhelm Loh Group, we believe industry can be an enabler for this transformation.
What role is played by initiatives such as the Industry 4.0 platform that define sovereign data spaces?
Seitz: The more that initiatives like these promote standardisation and agreement on reference architectures everyone will work with, the more effective they will be. We are playing our part and working hard on precisely that. However, what counts is the practical implementation of these concepts – including as a way of gaining experience faster and putting that back into the standards. At the Rittal plant in Haiger, after a huge amount of work and pain, we’ve learned to create data spaces and link them together to deliver smart production. To achieve that, the sister companies Rittal, Eplan, Cideon and German Edge Cloud pooled their experience and domain expertise relating to data from products, plants and production processes. Up to 18 terabytes of data are generated at the plant every day. However, it’s only when you put this data into exactly the right context that you get the transparency you need to gain genuine insights and optimise processes. This approach has helped us forge ahead. Incidentally, this isn’t the kind of work AI can do for you – it is actually the basis on which AI is deployed. The aim of smart production is then to utilise this data on an automated basis so that systems can respond to changes independently. Industry is only just getting started on this, but the outlook and roadmap are there.
You mentioned the energy transition. How essential is this type of smart production for that?
Seitz: Let’s take the example of energy consumption. At the moment, hardly anyone can break down a factory’s energy consumption by production processes or the parts that are produced, much less according to a specific timeline. Usually, the only thing there is to work with is the energy supplier’s consumption accounting. Until recently, that was all you needed. We fi mly believe the concept of carbon footprint and management based on energy availability will become a fourth key production parameter alongside the traditional parameters of time, costs and quality. Conventional ERP and manufacturing execution systems are not designed for that. At the Rittal plant in Haiger, the software architecture of our ONCITE Digital Production System (DPS) has helped us both measure energy consumption in detail and correlate that consumption with production, product and plant data (see graphic and box). It is only by understanding what kind of load is being generated in which machine or plant that you can work out where changes need to be made to deliver improvements. That simply wouldn’t be possible without transparency and dataflows between product development, production planning, production and energy suppliers.
What requirements does the software for that need to meet?
Seitz: Cloud-native software based on microservices makes all the difference. There are good reasons why the standardisation associated with that is currently the state of the art in IT software innovations. However, industry software often has longer development cycles and is used for longer periods. Most ERP and manufacturing execution systems come from an era when client-server technology was still being developed. Software like that works well for its specific purpose, but it lacks the flexibility for new requirements that is so urgently needed these days. That flexibility is offered by composable software, which can also gradually expand existing “brownfield” systems. In practical terms, this means I can very quickly get started with the most important functionalities and then add new modules as necessary – modules that share data via standardised interfaces (APIs). We are experiencing an immense technological revolution right now.
One project that the automotive industry has launched to digitalise its global supply chains is Catena-X. How important do you think that project is?
Seitz: Catena-X along with Manufacturing-X , which is based on it and has been announced for the autumn, are really important for industry. We have been involved in both from the start. The opportunities are diverse, ranging from carbon footprint and the circular economy all the way to tracing specific parts through all the stages of the supply chain. You need standards to make all that possible. Besides digital continuity on a technical level, you also need to standardise data sovereignty and other legal agreements. That way, you can really bring this kind of ecosystem to life. Furthermore, there has been an uptick in the number of participants who are also laying the foundations for digital continuity in their own companies. We’re working hard on both ends with ONCITE, including on pre-existing plants and systems. It is important that Catena-X continues to develop its international credentials, and that applies fundamentally to all forms of standardisation. The concept has to work for large economic areas, and we need to ensure international recognition. It’s a big challenge and we have to work very fast.
What advice would you offer a customer who wants to get to grips with their transformation now?
Seitz: Something we have long since learned from experience still applies – the greatest potential lies in optimising processes. Before you embark on digitalisation, you need to understand and describe the relevant processes with absolute precision. Next, you need to pursue standardisation and use solutions that are already available to you. Taking the best pre-existing solutions for each requirement and combining them in a way that enables digital continuity will help you make much faster progress compared to creating an in-house, all-in-one solution – even in a brownfiel scenario. This speed is needed for at least three different reasons. Firstly, to get your company fit for the transformation. Secondly, to ensure the energy transition can become an energy efficiency transition for industry. And, thirdly, to make sure the necessary data spaces and international ecosystems such as Catena-X and Manufacturing-X can grow.
Thank you for talking to us!
