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Study: Automotive industry leads digital revolution

Study: Automotive industry leads digital revolution

Technology News |
By eeNews Europe



The digitization of the production offers numerous advantages for the user companies, the study states. More than three out of four interviewees said that concepts like Industrie 4.0 optimise the processes and operations in their factories. Industrie 4.0 is a German-born manufacturing-oriented phenotype of the Internet of Things.

For the study, Bitkom and the Fraunhofer institute for labour science (IAO) interviewed managers of 400 enterprises with at least 100 employees active in Germany’s four core industries – automotive, chemicals, machine building and electrical industry. With a penetration of 53%, the automotive industry has the highest share of companies already using Industrie 4.0 schemes. In the electrical industry this figure is 48%, in the chemical industry 42%. In machine building the percentage was the lowest with 41%.

Digitization and interconnection of the production helps enterprises to optimise the production processes, said 76 % of the interviewees. During his presentation, Bitkom board member Winfried Holz quantified these effects: In the time frame from 2013 through 2025, the experts expect synergies worth 78 billion euros in Germany alone. 72 % of the interviewees said they expect that the digitization will help them to lower production cost. Likewise, a high percentage of the industrial experts expect to improve the utilisation of their production lines. However there are also concerns. The high investment costs are regarded as an obstacle to networked production by a strong majority of 72%.


So in which sense does digitization help engineers to streamline the production? According to the study, there are a number of major approaches: Social machines, global facilities, augmented operators, smart products, and predictive maintenance being the most popular ones. Social machines can, much like social networks of humans, organise themselves in interconnected structures, announcing availability and maintenance data to the production managers and the working teams. This kind of semi-autonomous self-organising manufacturing compounds is most widespread in the automotive industry where 38 % of all enterprises are already using them.

Global facilities means the interconnection of production systems across the corporate boundaries. Examples are the complex value chains in the automotive industry where customers and suppliers are interconnected in large digital entities.

Augmented operators is a scenario for IT utilisation by production workers. Instruments of this scenario are data goggles that enhance the field of view with additional digital information. Smart products are intelligent, programmable devices that communicate with the production equipment and inform the tool machines about the planned processing steps. The term also describes products that can be upgraded and modified by software updates even after being sold and supplied to the customer. Predictive maintenance is not as new as the other concepts described in the study. In this context, a machine collects process data and machine data to define the maintenance intervals. The machine analyses patterns that typically precede a failure, and continues to improve its prediction precision though learning processes.

In the German industry, Social machines and predictive maintenance are the most popular Industrie 4.0 approaches, with a penetration of 38% (automotive industry only) and 27% (all industries).

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