Rebels With a Cause.
During a conversation between CEOs Josef Wildgruber of BBS Automation and Uwe Weiss of the WEISS Group, they touched on topics that provide deep insights into the ongoing digitalization of the mechanical engineering field. Both the component maker and the system integrator believe that it’s essential to look beyond one’s own technological niche and see the big picture. This is essential for achieving a genuine digital transformation.
Recently the two CEOs – Josef Wildgruber of BBS Automation and Uwe Weiss of the WEISS Group – came together to commission parts of a production line for electric motors. They took advantage of the opportunity to talk about the conventional division of roles between component makers on the one hand and system integrators on the other. Inspired by the challenge of integrating a rotary indexing table into an assembly line, they also pursued various lines of thought on topics such as change, digitalization, and new ways for midsized companies to redefine mechanical engineering.
?Uwe Weiss: “The supermarket principle, with goods coming in and going out, is way out of date. We need to make mechanical engineering happen in a tighter, more coordinated, faster way. Instead of products, we need to offer standardized functionalities that are exactly what the customer needs for a particular system. Am I right or am I right?”
Josef Wildgruber: “The time will come when we, as the customer, will need more than just on-time delivery of components. Machines are getting smarter, and as machine builders and integrators we have to find ways to get entire packages that are tailored to our needs, including services that deliver real benefits.”
Uwe Weiss: “Yes, that’s exactly where all of us involved in creating value have to start making changes. If we want to get an edge on the competition, we need an integrated, all-inclusive approach instead of just focusing on technology. Know-how, organizational prerequisites, commercial attractiveness, the right solutions, and of course active involvement by customers …”
Josef Wildgruber: “Exactly – it’s about getting everybody involved to pull on one rope: companies and their employees, suppliers, and those who actually use the systems. Above all, this approach will let us change how people work and redefine the customer relationship, if we join forces and work together as a team. And this is where it gets exciting, namely if we completely remix the ingredients of mentality, communication, and habits. The times are past when it was enough to simply make lists of specifications and then go shopping for them. Now it’s about involving customers and interacting with them more extensively.”
Uwe Weiss: “Yes, this is our opportunity. Are you familiar with the VUCA concept behind this kind of approach? It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and has a lot to do with digital transformation, disruptive business models, and employees’ changing values. We need to turn our companies into agile organizations that are better able to respond to unpredictable situations. If we succeed in letting our people act entrepreneurially so that modularity, connectivity, digital twins, and autonomy become integral parts of their everyday work, we’ll build more efficient machines.”
Josef Wildgruber: “You say that it’s a new way of thinking for solving the problems of our dynamic, digital world. And I say that the challenge is to intelligently combine what is tried and tested with new things that still have to be created. At BBS Automation , for example, simulation has become a process that is now finally being lived and forges a link between ability and art.”
Uwe Weiss: “Thanks for bringing it up! As a component maker, we’re entering new territory with digital twins, which we’re already offering via the ISG Industrielle Steuerungstechnik GmbH TwinStore. Customers can take advantage of them to get up to speed faster. It’s digitalized engineering that adds value by redefining the value creation process. Our customer focus is becoming deeper and our collaboration is gaining a new, firmer basis.”
Josef Wildgruber: “We’re all very happy to have introduced simulations and virtual commissioning at an early stage.?Now we’re virtually commissioning various subsystems, an approach that has advanced standardization in sectors like mobility and medicine and has also reduced development times making real-world commissioning much more efficient. Our Polish subsidiary, ANT, has created a link between digital twins and MES that we’ve dubbed the BBS Smart Machine. You can see that our own corporate evolution is being actively co-shaped by the participants themselves.”
Uwe Weiss: “Building a bridge from engineering to production additionally strengthens the role of digitalization. It’s even more important to take the sales process to the next level with new business models and smart data. The USA and China are showing us how to do it in B2C with disruptive technologies and business models, and here in Europe we also need to promote investments in risk capital to give innovation a boost.”
Josef Wildgruber: “Yes that’s right, but as midsized companies our role isn’t defining economic policy. Rather, we have to be able to create more flexible value creation chains that turn into reliable value creation networks. In other words, with the ability to close gaps in the supply chain and establish novel ecoplatforms for this that will in turn enable flexible supply chains. Marketplaces of this kind could encourage everyone to make logistics and engineering better and broader.”
Uwe Weiss: “The idea makes sense: dividing up capabilities between midsized companies and collaborating to build machines as required. We’ve started bending the efficiency curve upward with our Go2Automation portal. Collaborating and having the right data and using them to create better applications and take them live faster is no longer a vision but reality.”
Josef Wildgruber: “Especially for building special-purpose machines, cross-company flexibility of this kind is valuable. The requirements can be formulated better, faster, and more clearly, and the involved processes speed up. Small-scale standardization becomes possible in these projects, and everybody benefits from the others’ application experience and solutions.”
Uwe Weiss: “This can also be extended to include general collaboration by companies, because when the platform keeps growing and a technology community gets established, entirely new business models are conceivable, like for service. In particular, application data generated on these platforms makes it easy for the participants to see what they need from one another.”
Josef Wildgruber: “That’s right! And once using machine data for processes has become established at component makers, system integrators, machine builders, and machine operators, we can start talking about increasing the efficiency of maintenance processes and then also about smart field services.”
Uwe Weiss: “In my opinion, this is our chance to create sophisticated smart services, because customers are going to demand them: from component makers, other suppliers, and machine builders, for example. The intelligent use of data is becoming more important than the ‘hardware’, because it’s generating a steady stream of new features for improving machine performance.”
Under the motto?What's Next??The?TeDo-Publishing House ?present a?series ?of articles in cooperation with the WEISS Group that focus on the digital transformation. Both internal and external topics are examined in depth. They follow technology- and customer-oriented possible steps of a digitization strategy and show added values for mechanical engineers or end users.?Join us on this exciting journey ... your WEISS Team.