Software can do a lot more than merely make work easier. It can earn businesses money – by helping them reduce energy and resource consumption, optimize their development costs and minimize downtime. It’s called data analytics – the science of filtering, linking and analyzing large volumes of data – and it will be a key theme at HANNOVER MESSE this year, April 1 - 5. “Over the years, we have developed HANNOVER MESSE into by far the largest B2B platform for integrated processes and IT solutions,” says Hubertus von Monschaw, Global Director Digital Factory for HANNOVER MESSE. “The companies exhibiting at the Digital Factory show will be presenting digital solutions for all areas of the industrial process chain, solutions that will smooth the way for the digital transformation of industry.”
Bringing processes together
Digitization is the only way forward, of that there can be no doubt. “For companies in manufacturing, the challenge is to get on board sooner rather than later and embrace the transformation of their operations into digital factories as a pivotal opportunity to safeguard their future,” explains Franz Gruber, founder and CEO of Forcam GmbH. “At a macro-economic level, the challenge with Industry 4.0 is to walk the talk and lay the economic groundwork for digital transformation – in the form of the fast-track upgrade of power grids and data networks, tax incentives and an appropriately qualified workforce.” One result of the trend towards business process digitization and Industry 4.0 is that previously disjointed sub-processes are increasingly converging to form seamless digital value chains. This convergence trend is something that software providers have been quick to pick up on. “Increasingly we’re offering our products as an integrated software suite,” says Karsten Pierschke, head of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications at PSI Software AG. “At the same time, the growing trend towards product individualization increasingly means that business and production processes need to be flexible. Our software response to this development has been to integrate optimization functions based on industrial AI and advanced fuzzy logic.”
MES conference
Many software providers offer solutions for optimal integration of MES systems into allied systems. iTAC Software AG is one such provider. “By integrating our intelligent iTAC.MES.Suite solution with leading IIoT platforms it is possible, for example, to achieve integrated data analytics and predictive maintenance scenarios,” explains iTAC Marketing & Communications Director Michael Fischer. The solution is used in a range of industries and applications, including production logistics. “Like production, material logistics needs to be automated and flexible. Hence, the increasing use of driverless transport systems and automated guided vehicles in logistics settings. Among other things, iTAC supports automatic replenishment control with driverless transport systems in SMT production.”
MES technology also features prominently in the supporting program at HANNOVER MESSE. For example, during the 11th MES Conference on Thursday, 4 April, MES system providers and users in the manufacturing industry will gather at the Convention Center in order to discuss how manufacturing software can be used to boost efficiency in discrete and process manufacturing. The motto for this April’s conference is, “MES in times of data integration”.
