You can’t accuse Volkswagen’s Dirk Voigt of having his head in the clouds—he’ll take it as a compliment. The head of digital production at VW, Voigt and a team of manufacturing and IT pros are developing an industrial cloud computing system to amalgamate production data from more than 120 factories. The objective: greater efficiency and lower costs.
Automotive OEMs love to show off their automated body-in-white assembly lines. Commercials invariably feature dozens of six-axis robots producing showers of sparks in choreographed routines.
BMW has been at the forefront of Industry 4.0 for years. For example, the company was an early adopter of additive manufacturing, and today prints hundreds of thousands of production parts annually.
Most manufacturers agree that digital transformation is necessary to remain competitive today and thrive tomorrow. Many large companies have already begun initiatives. But, when asked to quantify the impact of those initiatives on the bottom line, they often come up short.
Process improvement projects have traditionally struggled with obtaining accurate data quickly and easily. In many cases, various data sources provide competing sources of the truth. Smart technologies offer the means to provide a single source of the truth, without the time-consuming and labor-intensive efforts of the past.
Resilient supply chains are fundamental to our national security and economic prosperity. The pandemic-induced collapse of global supply chains has launched a national movement to strengthen domestic manufacturing.
Justifying automation has never been easier. The Covid pandemic, coupled with a severe worker shortage, a widening skills gap and the "great resignation," has increased demand for automated guided vehicles, conveyors, robots and other types of equipment.