Intensified collaboration with SME

For the imple­men­ta­tion of Indus­try 4.0, Siemens is rely­ing on even more inten­sive col­lab­o­ra­tion with small to medi­um-sized com­pa­nies. “Small to medi­um-sized enter­pris­es are the back­bone of the Ger­man econ­o­my. That’s why the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of small and medi­um-sized com­pa­nies is essen­tial for the future via­bil­i­ty of Ger­many as a busi­ness loca­tion,” explained Klaus Helm­rich, Man­ag­ing Board Mem­ber of Siemens AG, at the “Forum Deutsch­er Mit­tel­stand” (Ger­man SME Forum) in Stuttgart. “This requires increased col­lab­o­ra­tion between com­pa­nies of dif­fer­ent sizes — from start-ups to medi­um-sized com­pa­nies to large cor­po­ra­tions”. Dur­ing the con­fer­ence, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of numer­ous well-known Ger­man com­pa­nies from the machine and plant man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try, dis­cussed strate­gies to ensure the future via­bil­i­ty of small and medi­um-sized businesses.
Accord­ing to Helm­rich, “the suc­cess­ful dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of small to medi­um-sized busi­ness­es requires strate­gic deci­sions by top man­age­ment on two lev­els. They need to align their port­fo­lio with Indus­try 4.0 and fur­ther devel­op their inter­nal process­es. This also includes train­ing and fur­ther edu­ca­tion and employ­ees.” For exam­ple, com­pa­nies should offer new solu­tions, dig­i­tal ser­vices and busi­ness mod­els, such as “pay per use” mod­els for the sale of machin­ery and plant. In addi­tion, inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies such as cloud appli­ca­tions, addi­tive man­u­fac­tur­ing, flex­i­ble han­dling sys­tems or arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence must be used. Inte­grat­ed indus­tri­al secu­ri­ty mea­sures are essen­tial to increase con­fi­dence in IT tech­nolo­gies and min­i­mize cyber risks.
The tech­ni­cal pre­req­ui­sites for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion are, for exam­ple, now in place thanks to the Siemens Dig­i­tal Enter­prise port­fo­lio. Com­pa­nies of any size and indus­try can ben­e­fit from this with man­age­able, grad­u­al­ly increas­ing invest­ment costs. As a result, they can already achieve greater flex­i­bil­i­ty, short­er time-to-mar­ket, increased effi­cien­cy and enhanced qual­i­ty today. Accord­ing to Siemens, there are con­crete exam­ples of cus­tomer appli­ca­tions which demon­strate that prod­ucts, plant and machin­ery can be devel­oped in up to 30 per­cent less time. Pro­duc­tion effi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty can be increased by up to a quarter.
One already avail­able plat­form for dig­i­tal solu­tions is Mind­Sphere – the open, cloud-based IoT oper­at­ing sys­tem from Siemens — which helps com­pa­nies to gain a com­pet­i­tive edge by using data analy­sis. Users can imple­ment Mind­Sphere with min­i­mal invest­ment and scale it accord­ing to their require­ments. In this con­text, Helm­rich cit­ed the user orga­ni­za­tion “Mind­Sphere World”, found­ed in Jan­u­ary 2018 and cur­rent­ly com­pris­ing more than 50 mem­bers (in Ger­many and Italy), as an exam­ple of new forms of coop­er­a­tion. Its goal is to expand the ecosys­tem around Mind­Sphere world­wide. The asso­ci­a­tion sup­ports the indi­vid­ual mem­bers in devel­op­ing and opti­miz­ing IoT solu­tions on Mind­Sphere as well as open­ing up new mar­kets in the dig­i­tal economy.