Customers are at the core of industry 4.0 pushing its boundaries and encouraging its development, according to Siemens.
Customers are at the core of industry 4.0 pushing its boundaries and encouraging its development, according to Siemens.
Speaking at a recent summit in Taipei, Jan Michael Mrosik, CEO of Digital Factory Division at Siemens, said that the fourth revolution in industry is by far the most complex we have experienced in history.
“Where does it come from and why are we going there? Why is digitalization going into the factory environment?” he said. “It is simply our customers are demanding this. The customers, in terms of the end customers who use the products, because they want us to be speedier, they want the products faster so the lifecycle of the products gets to go down.”
Elaborating further on the topic he listed out three more points that are crucial to industry 4.0. The second point is flexibility. Each customer wants customized products. “The consumer wants to drive a car that doesn’t look like his neighbor’s car at the end of the day. Flexibility is also required because demand changes.”
The third point is that individualized products cannot come at the expense of quality. No customer would accept in the long term a product that is simply inferior from a quality perspective.
“The last point is efficiency, which means the assets have to be used efficiently because costs have to be low and the price have to be competitive and on the other side we need to make sure we work sustainably in order to use the resources in a very sustainable and best way possible,” Mrosik said.
IT security is of utmost importance because the industry 4.0 comes with the internet of things, which means the devices are connected. Mrosik added that at Siemens they have realized that they should look at the value chain for production and the construction of machines in an extremely holistic way.
The company feels the need to start from the design of the product and the design of the machine, and go all the way through production and digitalize the whole chain in a comprehensive and collective manner.
“This is why Siemens digitalizes the value chain from beginning to end,” Mrosik said.