Let’s start with a riddle: she is increasingly indispensable, yet still often underestimated, her celebrity status is still in the works, but a congress already bears her name. What is meant is – the factory software. It is of enormous relevance for the value creation process of a company; in times of digitization more than ever. She’s the best horse in the stable, whoever doesn’t back her loses the race, and the bookies rejoice.
On March 20th, we honored these pioneering and decisive software solutions in the field of factory software. We, that is the Research and Application Center Industry 4.0 and the trade journal Fabriksoftware. For the second time, users from production companies, scientists and software developers came together in Frankfurt for the two-day Factory Software Congress 2019 to present their solutions.
As part of the Fabriksoftware-Kongress 2019, the finalists finally presented their software to the audience and themselves to the jury, who dug deeper. The final number of points was calculated from the average of the written application and the evaluation of the presentation.
From the application to the winner’s podium
The factory software of the year competition takes place in two stages, a process that has proven itself. First, the companies apply in writing and present their software based on six specified criteria. Among other things, they answer what concrete benefits there are for the customer, how
the solution can be integrated into existing software concepts, as well as any cooperation that exists with research institutions. The application documents are then viewed and evaluated by the jury members.
Factory Software of the Year 2019: These are the Winners!
Category
Winner
Where is the technological journey going?
In his keynote speech at the specialist congress, Professor Norbert Gronau drew attention to six essential trends in the order of their impact on the upcoming projects in the coming months: Internet of Things as the most important aspect, followed by artificial intelligence, collaborative robotics, real-time big data, and virtual reality respectively augmented reality and finally the change in business processes towards a platform economy. In the process, business-to-business relationships (B2B) become more deeply staggered value chains, which also include the consumer as the customer’s customer (B2B2C). The use of systems for virtual or augmented reality is becoming more and more concrete. With his introductory lecture, Gronau delivered an all-round blow that was deepened in further thematic blocks. This is how Angelo Bindi from MES DACH spoke. eV about the opportunities that networked factory software brings with it and about the requirements for the system architecture of ME systems of the future. Dr. Olaf Sauer from Fraunhofer IOSB, in turn, looked at artificial intelligence and machine learning in the factory and enriched the theoretical part with practical examples. To use Shopfloor
Execution systems in discrete production were then taken care of by Enrico Franz from Elabo GmbH. The question of how secure production data is in the cloud was asked by Dr.-Ing. Sander Lass from the Research and Application Center Industry 4.0. His lecture was about how new business models in the value chain can be designed securely. Sören Rose from Inray answered how Industry 4.0 can be implemented through system coupling
Industriesoftware GmbH, while Professor Joachim Berlak, Managing Director of software4production GmbH, demonstrated a real-time MES in the digital factory and discussed future challenges. Finally, Dominik Lenarczyk from ubrich GmbH spoke about the blockchain, an essential buzzword of the present, and prophesied why immutable logs will change production. The two days of the Factory Software Congress 2019 went by in no time – with four excellent winners and lively exchange and discussion.