Legacy processes and structures, demographic changes and the digital transformation are challenges related to Industry 4.0. In particular, what are the future challenges facing medium-sized control cabinet manufacturers?
The challenges are multi-layered. A crucial one is customer-specific production – the key concept is “lot size 1.” Customers want their control cabinet produced as quickly as possible. For the production department, that requires a high degree of flexibility in the face of ever-shortening throughput times. And more intense foreign competition, in Eastern Europe for example, isn’t making things any easier. Many companies are becoming more and more tempted by the notion of shifting larger portions of their control cabinet production there. Last but not least, the growing skills shortage is a challenge: Keeping pace with large companies and hiring competent people is even harder for small and medium-sized control cabinet manufacturers.
But it doesn’t sound like these challenges have just appeared out of nowhere ...
No, in the control cabinet manufacturing industry – as in many other industrial sectors – none of this is new. However, the necessity of significantly efficiency increases has become clear. Most companies have long maintained their competitiveness by improving their value creation processes. At this time, we still have a great deal of very competitive control cabinet manufacturers in Germany. But that doesn’t mean that the industry can rest on its laurels. The digital transformation presents control cabinet manufacturers with many opportunities, but also many challenges. Addressing these is unavoidable.
One crucial competitive factor concerns digital engineering. Why do many control cabinet manufacturers still rely on paper-based assembly plans when the control cabinet production process is digital anyway?
Digitization offers enormous efficiency potential for the entire value creation process: I have access to digital information about the control cabinet that I can use to make downstream processes more efficient. When I consider the race to exploit potential efficiency, I see both digitization of the processes and the associated automation as tremendous competitive edges. Therefore, investing in their own digitization potential is a fundamental next step for companies. Nonetheless, many companies hesitate and fall back on conventional tools. That often has to do with the fact that a typical control cabinet manufacturer is a medium-sized company, caught up in everyday concerns, which seldom leave much time for strategizing.
In your opinion, why is not enough emphasis placed on process work?
It’s like any strategic question companies face: How much time should I invest for strategic considerations, which yield no direct economic benefit, after all? However, scrutinizing and optimizing my processes is essential in order to remain competitive in the future. The competition, which is more automated, cost-effective and powerful, is great. Another central element of digitization is the question of what I really want to digitize in order to make processes efficient and transparent. However, it’s also clear that employees often lack the qualifications necessary to conceive and design leaner processes.
Who in a company do you see as the driver of a digital transformation?
It’s crucial that the senior management are one hundred percent committed to the issue. The path to digitization is not free. It’s an investment in the future, which involves more than just buying a tool or machine. It’s an investment in staffing and in cooperation with third parties. However, I also think that everyone in the control cabinet manufacturing ecosystem has an interest in making processes as efficient as possible. Control cabinet manufacturers can strengthen their role – from the machine and equipment manufacturer, to the component supplier, all the way to the engineer and tool supplier.
How can production be networked and the data that can be extracted from it be exploited in order to optimize, not just one production step, but an entire value creation chain?
If I want maximize the automation of production, I need to provide this information early on. I can do that by collecting all the data centrally in a digital model as early as possible so it can be used further in all downstream automated production processes. That’s what we mean when we speak of a three-dimensional layout. The information basis I produce consistently at this point is the key to the digital factory. Ultimately, this is nothing other than the creation of a digital twin of the control cabinet that can be used later for the entire production process, and also for further operation.
Design and production are two different segments of the value creation chain – but the end goal is the same. How can the two “languages” be better linked to each other?
In this connection, I like to mention the concept of “production-oriented design”: Subsequent production should already be considered during the control cabinet design phase. That only works if skilled people from production can route their knowledge and experience back to the design phase. Production workers are often very experienced and have spent years reading circuit diagrams, and optimizing the control cabinets as well. This feedback must flow back to the project design phase efficiently. That’s one way experienced workers could be involved directly in the design phase.
This type of interdisciplinary cooperation sounds very efficient in theory. What does the reality look like?
It has been the case in the past, and remains so today, that the design data is partially provided by the customer, reworked a little around the edges and then passed to production. Where automation and efficiency of production need to be increased, the control cabinet plan must be thought through in detail. Continuous coordination between the different departments is essential for this. Sooner or later, much more than the actual production know-how will be built up and entrenched in the design phase. In contrast, production will focus more and more on the handling of machines and production systems.
How long will the transformation of control cabinet manufacturing process take? Where are we at now?
We speak of a digital transformation process, and most companies are taking their first steps in this right now. However, many control cabinet manufacturers already have experienced with similar transformation processes, such as introducing cable assemblers or drilling machines, which many control cabinet manufacturers carried out over ten years ago. The process that took place there is no different from what now needs to be gradually built up in other areas. Today there are already companies exploiting their digital potential to a great degree, but there are also those that still handle production as they did 15 years ago – it will be difficult for the latter.