Hannover Messe 2023 Day One: Manufacturers emphasizing industrial transformation, flexibility
Manufacturers at Hannover Messe 2023 are tightening their focus and emphasizing total solutions and products for their customers. See video.
Industrial transformation insights
- Hannover Messe’s theme for the 2023 event is industrial transformation.
- For many manufacturers, industrial transformation is about being more open from a product perspective and giving engineers more flexibility.
Hannover Messe returned in a more subdued form than in previous years as the show tries rebounding after the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the show must go on and the theme of industrial transformation was very much prevalent for many companies. Automation remains a major priority for manufacturers looking to keep up with demand as labor woes continue to persist. So do supply chain challenges, though they aren’t as a big a problem as they were in 2022.
Manufacturers emphasized providing customers with more total solutions to give their customers whatever help they need regardless of what it is. Courtesy: Chris Vavra, CFE Media and Technology
Consolidating, tightening product focus, industrial cloud
Because of COVID-19, many companies are turning their focus toward developing not just one product solution, but rather developing an entire suite. That can include everything from the motor or drive, parts inside the motor and drive and the cloud platform where the data goes after being transmitted.
“For us, it’s not just providing the product or hardware. We want to provide the whole solution,” said Ronai Ayhan, manager of global public relations, discrete automation, for Emerson. “We want to be able to give them anything they need in the portfolio.”
Amit Patel, director of digital transformation for Emerson, agreed. “We’re about connecting the factory floor and unlocking that trapped data. It’s about taking all these pieces to the cloud so something can be made out of it.”
Emerson’s theme “Floor to Cloud: The Future of Automation” encapsulates and serves as a model for what others are hoping to achieve in their efforts to transform on an industrial basis. Much of it is coming because companies need to stay ahead of the curve and deliver products their customers want. The workers might not be there, but the demand remains strong.
Emerson demonstrated an example of their “Floor to Cloud: The Future of Automation” at Hannover Messe 2023. Courtesy: Chris Vavra, CFE Media and Technology
Lenze, a company known mostly for motors and drives, is tilting its focus toward automation. The company is leveraging their 75 years of history to help deliver a full portfolio that will give engineers what they need. The preferred method of delivery is less pen and paper and is more digital and automated.
“We started with improving drive technology because it’s what we’re known for, but we’re moving into automating our systems and platforms,” said Ines Oppermann, corporate communications for Lenze.
Making automation more open and smarter
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning play a role in enhancing automation by providing information to the user.
“You can train an AI model to learn patterns,” said Werner Paulin, the product owner of Nupano, an open automation platform making its debut at Hannover Messe. “It can’t tell you what’s wrong or right, but it can tell you what is likely to happen.”
Nupano is designed to let machine builders to bring innovations in at the machine level for themselves and let them leverage digitalization.
Companies looking to leverage digitalization are becoming more software-agnostic as the lines have continued blurring over the years.
“It’s about flexibility and control,” said Ramon Boncompte, a sales director and co-owner of Industrial Shields, whose company sold industrial programmable logic controllers based on open-source hardware. “We’re about saving resources and having the customer use our products to gather the data they need.”
Chris Vavra is web content manager, CFE Media and Technology, cvavra@cfemedia.com.
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