„Let’s dare to exchange more data“

In conversation with Dr.-Ing. Olaf Sauer

If we are to take full advantage of the potentials offered by digitalization in industry, then the transfer and shared use of data must become much more commonplace. That is the opinion of Dr. Olaf Sauer of the Fraunhofer Institute in Karlsruhe. He therefore believes that greater openness, communication and transparency are essential.

How can companies effectively advance in their drive toward digitalization and use it profitably?

I believe that multilateral data exchange will become even more important in the future, that is to say the transfer and shared use of data that the actors present in certain sectors or process chains actually already possess. The task is to make this data available and to use it. For example, a metalworking company that uses presses might find its material manufacturer’s coil data important because this information would help it run its systems better. Of course, it is perfectly normal to perform the conventional fine-tuning of individual process steps; however, in my opinion, higher-level data exchange in so-called data ecosystems has much greater potential to bring about improvements and boost efficiency. At the technical level, this potential can be exploited without difficulty today. Instead, the limiting factor here often tends to be the presence of a corporate culture in which interdisciplinary data exchange is just not part of a company’s business philosophy. As a result, if digitalization is to progress, what we need is more openness, communication and transparency and, of course, the development of the corresponding data ecosystems.

What are the benefits of digitalization projects for your customers, how are such projects handled?

Digitalization projects make it possible to quantify and take advantage of genuine opportunities to make savings – as we have seen at a current customer that manufactures wooden boards. This customer was able to use digital tools to optimize their material consumption, increase machine availability and implement directly integrated inline quality control. These are significant improvements that genuinely cut costs. We start by working together with the customer to create a roadmap, clarify the areas of the customer’s business where digitalization makes sense and specify what the aims are. We then define a schedule of measures extending over, perhaps, five years. It is vitally important for companies to start by tidying up and slimming down their existing processes before embarking on digitalization. This is because a badly organized process will not be made any better by digitalization. The first step in the digitalization processes is to work with basic systems that use production data, for example, and make the manufacturing operations transparent: What is the machine status? What jobs have already been completed and to what extent? What is the quality of the parts? This is followed by data analysis, for example in order to identify any deviations from normal behavior. This in turn acts as the basis for processes such as machine learning, AI and predictive maintenance.

For what industries and applications are the IOSB’s automation and digitalization solutions particularly relevant, what are their characteristics?

Our target group consists primarily of manufacturing companies, such as mechanical engineering firms, component manufacturers or software vendors, that is to say equipment suppliers to factories and manufacturers producing a very wide range of goods. A recent study has shown that these equipment suppliers are already very well-positioned in terms of digitalization and automation. However, the factory operators, for example mid-sized companies with 20 to 50 employees, still have ground to make up when it comes to digital technology. Nevertheless, it has been shown that proprietary solutions, that is to say solutions developed by companies themselves and designed specifically for their own products, are not the route to success. That is why the digitalization solutions that we propose are broad-based and extremely scalable. We are committed to open standards that are available on the market, ensure the necessary interoperability between the different applications and lead to genuine improvements.