Global Megatrends Shaping the Future of Production: Digitalization in Industry

Digital transformation has swept through every aspect of our private and professional lives. But perhaps more than any other industry, digitalization has caused the most pronounced changes in the manufacturing sector.

The factory of the future is one in which digitalized processes – from product development, to production, to machine maintenance – will be steered by strategically collected data.

Digital manufacturing is a production landscape in which products, processes, and material flows can be continuously optimized on the basis of real-time data, giving manufacturers the tools to respond with agility and flexibility to new business models, diverse customer requirements, and changing market conditions.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a gives manufacturers the tools to network and seamlessly control entire plants, systems, and processes via Cloud platform. Interconnected sensors, actuators, and network components installed in manufacturing equipment deliver valuable data about the status of individual components and overall production efficiency.

By enabling systems and machines to directly communicate with each other, IIoT enables the autonomous optimization of production processes and seamless process modifications. Operators and employees who work on these production systems are also able to derive important information and action steps from the holistically processed and visualized data.

Another benefit of IIoT is that it reduces errors in the production process, thus leading to a sustained increase in the efficiency, quality and availability of manufacturing.