ProveIt! Conference, what an amazing and inspiring event! I think it's getting clear what direction manufacturers should be taking.
In the past week, my colleagues Evy Svensson, Douglas Higa, Sivasubramaniyan K and I were lucky enough to join the event in Dallas. I'd say this event has been, and will be for the coming time very impactful for us at Scania Group.
Walker Reynolds, Zack Scriven, the MCs Amy Williams & Jeff Winter, all the great people at 4.0 Solutions and Intellic Integration (shouting out Vaughn Turner, Stephanie VanVolkenburg, Tonya Reynolds, Travis Campbell, Matthew Olson, Mario Gonsales Ishikawa, Michael Walker, and really everyone else!) have done an amazing job setting this conference up. For me, there's no question about it, make next year happen! Thank you all!
Some key takeaways from the event for me are:
?·?Interoperability and enabling the shopfloor through the Unified Namespace is clearly very successful. Not only did we see the vendors at the event (almost) all successfully integrate with an existing factory that has implemented a UNS, but they also integrated with each other -- within 16 weeks!
?·?The power of the community. I've been part of the Discord community for a while and have participated in 4.0 Solutions' courses. One of the greatest things about being in Dallas is seeing all the people in real life. I've had many great conversations that impacted me personally and everyone was super supportive. I want to highlight some discussions with Michael Brown ?, Mario Gonsales Ishikawa, Drake Scifers, and Ema Roloff, but really everyone I got to speak even just a little with!
?·?Google Cloud, AVEVA, & Snowflake + Concept Reply GmbH showcased making data do the work. I gotta say that it's been hard to find a good way of doing that. What they showed was dead simple and really valueable, and all used generative AI in a good way to add the human factor to it.
?·?HiveMQ, Litmus, HighByte, Inductive Automation, Dell Technologies, & Siemens are making the difference on the factory edge and connectivity. I think it’s quite clear now how we should be handling the edge and what hidden value still lies there. How exactly we'll move forward, is a big discussion, and the presentations will be really helpful to those discussions.
?·?Last, but definitely not least, is Tulip Interfaces, who did one of the most amazing presentations. Combining Tulip with the UNS results in the craziest time-to-value you can get on the shopfloor for new solutions.
?·?Of course I'm forgetting others, and the ones that I've interacted with did an amazing job too!
For us, ultimately it's about improving the work of our people in the factories and decreasing production cost, which is not only nice for us, but great for our customers and the journey that Scania wants to take.
What's next? Right after the event, we travelled down to San Antonio to visit our friends at International, who have been very kind to welcome us to their plant.