TOPICS & NEWS

Infographic illustrating the four life stages of the electric car. The development, production, use, and recycling of an electric vehicle provide opportunities for new business models, but also require new skills.

How e-mobility is altering the balance of power in the automotive industry. All-electric cars are still the exception on our streets. However, the switch from the drive concept of the combustion engine to the electric powertrain is gaining momentum in the industry. We present three dimensions where particularly far-reaching changes can be expected.

Electromobility is creating new rules for carmakers and their suppliers. With e-mobility, the automotive industry is facing the biggest paradigm shift in its more than one-hundred-year history. This change could be life-threatening, in particular for highly specialized suppliers.

Ignoring is not an option: 3D-Printing changes Manufacturing

Beta LAYOUT: Prototypes for new printed circuit boards developed with EOS technology. PCB specialist Beta LAYOUT faced a number of different challenges when manufacturing customized prototypes for interconnect devices. A workpiece produced using additive manufacturing that receives its functionality via direct laser structuring provided the solution.

Interview with Dr. Thomas Jüngling, CEO, H.C. Starck Surface Technology and Ceramic Powders GmbH

In an interview, Dr. Thomas Jüngling explains why the market for additive manufacturing has picked up speed and what trends and opportunities companies should be aware of.

More than just gimmicks – the use of 3D printing components in industry. Industrial 3D printing is claimed to significantly reduce production times and costs while making the supply chain more flexible. The technology has great potential to creatively transform traditional production processes across all sectors.

Fresh impetus for the future development of additive manufacturing. Rapid software development, topology optimization for functional parts and new printing materials are only a few examples of the momentum of 3D printing technology. Taking the key raw material metal as an example we illustrate which future developments are of particular importance.

Ignoring it is not an option: 3D printing is changing industry. Additive manufacturing is still seen as a limited technology in relation to overall production volume. And yet there are many indications that 3D printing will gain a firm place in industry as a production method and will change established forms of organization and process.

Hitchhiker´s Guide to the Smart Products Economy - Let us inspire you!

Our journey takes us from Zell am See to another part of the Alps, Sattel-Hochstuckli in Switzerland. After heavy mining vehicles and giant agricultural machinery, we now come across something else that boys both young and old dream of: Kässbohrer’s snow groomer ‘PistenBully’. As in countless other snow-covered areas of Europe, powerful tracked vehicles ensure perfect snow

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People settled in Zell am See in the Pinzgau region of Austria as early as the Bronze Age. The first Roman expeditions to reach the area just before the start of the Common Era found a flourishing Celtic culture that had existed in the region for half a millennium (after of course displacing another flourishing culture that had also occupied the area for 500 years)...

Lohr is an idyllic town in the Spessart hills, characterized by halftimbered houses, the river Main and the legend nurtured successfully by the town’s tourist marketing office for the last thirty years that, according to an extremely questionable but absolutely endearing theory, Lohr was the birth town of Snow White...

It took us exactly 15 hours to fly from San Francisco to Düsseldorf and drive by car to Harsewinkel. The town on the river Ems is a “one-industry city” – agricultural machinery manufacturer CLAAS has dominated the local economy for almost a century to such a degree that there has been a fierce debate in the town for many years about adding the byname “Harvester City”...

San Francisco Airport welcomes us in bright sunshine. This time we decide against a hire car in favor of an Uber driver, who takes us to San Mateo just half an hour away. San Mateo is one of the hotspots for start-ups in Silicon Valley, but our destination is neither one of the up-and-coming hightech forges nor one of the innumerable venture capital companies that have offices in the city...

We flew from Amsterdam/Schiphol to Stockholm/Arlanda in two hours, exchanged money, hired a car and now we’re already on our way again. The next stop on our journey is the mine at Garpenberg, near the small town of Hedemora situated a good two-and-a-half hours north of Stockholm...

The drive from Speyside down to Newcastle upon Tyne – the next stage of our journey – takes almost six hours. Located in the north of England at the terminal point of the Roman Hadrian’s Wall, the city of Newcastle has retained the charm of its lively thousand-year history in many places.

It’s not just the smart products at a modern airport that brought us to Scotland. After a drive of just under four hours through the wonderfully sparse mountain landscape of the Highlands, we arrive in Speyside, the heart of the Scotch whisky industry...

The Lufthansa flight from Munich to Edinburgh takes around two and a half hours. This is where our journey through the smart product economy begins...

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear,” is how Mark Weiser’s now legendary essay “The Computer for the 21st Century” begins. Published 25 years ago, Weiser’s vision of the omnipresent computer that is invisible as a separate device and, more importantly, of the pervasive network, has finally become reality...

Bosch Rexroth AG won the "2014 Industry 4.0 Award" with its new pilot assembly line. The company implemented an end-to-end network approach – and in the process increased not just the efficiency and quality of production but also provided for greater flexibility in the way it deploys its employees and an ergonomic workplace design.

How the Internet of Things is transforming manufacturing

Interview with Mark van Rijmenam, Founder of Datafloq. The management of Big Data is the foundation of all IIoT-based business models. Mark vanRijmenam explains in this interview what is required for its rapid, enterprise-wide launch – and to what extent industry, which still thinks in terms of traditional supply chains, must reinvent itself.

Quality Management 4.0. Even pioneers of “intelligent manufacturing” continue to focus on standardized production and quality processes that are already defined. In spite of this, it will be vital to adapt processes and tools used for quality assurance to the smart factory in such a way that they can be deployed in a highly automated and digital way.

Key levers for a modular and efficient manufacturing Today the market for intelligent products is growing at its strongest rate in industry. If manufacturing companies wish to transform their value-added processes into digital, platform-based business models by using such products, they should be aware of various aspects.

Interview with Thomas Ebenhöch, Site and Plant Manager Regensburg, Continental Automotive GmbH Thomas Ebenhöch describes the benefits arising from the teamwork between humans and collaborative robots in Continental’s Regensburg plant.

The Backbone of the Smart Factory. IoT technologies that are currently available offer extremely interesting possibilities of organizing shop floor management more effectively and efficiently. The article explains what companies should consider when establishing an agile, transparent management system with digital tools.

Interview with Michael Berner, Production Manager, BorgWarner Ludwigsburg GmbH. How BorgWarner changed its shift planning with its own KapaflexCy app and what best practice experience was gained from it is explained by Michael Berner.

Milestones on the Road to an Intelligent Factory. Inside the “smart factory”, the way to increasing quality and output while using fewer resources is via a comprehensive model of operational excellence. The article introduces six elements that are essential to this.

Why Companies need a New Concept of Transparency