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Press Release05 May 2017Digital Factory Bad Neustadt / Saale
Metalworking goes digital: experience Industry 4.0 in manufacturing "live"
The "Arena of Digitalization" was opened today by Klaus Helmrich, member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG, Jan Mrosik, CEO of Siemens' Digital Factory Division, Wolfgang Heuring, CEO of Siemens' Motion Control Business Unit, and Peter Deml, head of the electric motor plant in Bad Neustadt an der Saale.
"In the light of advancing digitalization and the associated requirements resulting from it, industry faces entirely new opportunities and possibilities," said Klaus Helmrich, member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG. "These all center on a more and more growing individualization of products as well as of quality, efficiency, speed and flexibility. Companies in the manufacturing sector are having to respond to increasingly differentiated customer requirements and are therefore reliant on flexible production right down to a batch size of one."
As a response to these challenges, Siemens is offering its customers from the manufacturing sector a comprehensive portfolio of products and solutions under the Digital Enterprise umbrella. Jan Mrosik, CEO of Siemens' Digital Factory Division, explains: "Our solutions cover the entire value chain, from product design, production planning and production engineering to production execution and services. Spanning all these are Teamcenter, a database that is accessible to all parties involved, and MindSphere, a platform for life-cycle and data analytics. If this production process is integrated and digitalized from end to end, a company can achieve substantial overall optimization outcomes." At the electric motor plant in Bad Neustadt an der Saale, Siemens uses six specific topic areas to show how products and solutions from its own portfolio can be implemented step by step in a production process that is already up and running.
"Frequent innovations, individually tailored products, and the resulting high degree of product diversity: these are the challenges which the production process at the electric motor plant in Bad Neustadt has to rise to today," said Wolfgang Heuring, summing up the situation at the plant today, adding: "Digitalization is helping us to tackle these challenges successfully. We plan to use the "Arena of Digitalization" and the example of our own manufacturing to demonstrate to our customers – machine builders as well as machine operators – the advantages that using Siemens digitalization technologies provides. Digitalization solutions will also help us considerably in continuing to maintain a leading position among our global competitors in future and, last but not least, to secure jobs in the region in this way. We want to share our knowledge and experience of digitalization here at this location with our customers from the machine tool industry. That is our goal."
"Digitalization of the processes in the plant is a process of continuous development. Initially, we focused on using digitalization in manufacturing to create consistency throughout the CAD-CAM/CNC chain, including tool and NC program management. Systems that had previously functioned separately were synchronized and fitted with digital interfaces. In addition, we implemented new tools, optimized our NC programs and made various design adjustments," said Peter Deml, head of the plant in Bad Neustadt, commenting on the implementation of digital solutions in manufacturing. As a result, the electric motor plant in Bad Neustadt an der Saale has so far successfully achieved 40 per cent faster throughput times where processes have been modified, shortened correction loops by 50 per cent and increased ramp-up times for new machines by 60 per cent.
Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a global technology powerhouse that has stood for engineering excellence, innovation, quality, reliability and internationality for more than 165 years. The company is active in more than 200 countries, focusing on the areas of electrification, automation and digitalization. One of the world's largest producers of energy-efficient, resource-saving technologies, Siemens is a leading supplier of efficient power generation and power transmission solutions and a pioneer in infrastructure solutions as well as automation, drive and software solutions for industry. The company is also a leading provider of medical imaging equipment – such as computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging systems – and a leader in laboratory diagnostics as well as clinical IT. In fiscal 2016, which ended on September 30, 2016, Siemens generated revenue of €79.6 billion and net income of €5.6 billion. At the end of September 2016, the company had around 351,000 employees worldwide. Further information is available on the Internet at www.siemens.com.
Contact
Katharina Lamsa
Siemens AG
Gleiwitzer Str. 555
90475 Nuremberg
Germany
90475 Nuremberg
Germany
+49 (911) 895-7975
Bernhard Lott
Siemens AG
Werner-von-Siemens-Str. 50
91052 Erlangen
Germany
91052 Erlangen
Germany
+49 (9131) 7-39040