A group of major technology manufacturers, now including warp knitting machinery leader Karl Mayer, plan to harness the value of interconnectivity through the new ADAMOS platform. Adrian Wilson reports.
Karl Mayer has recently become one of seven key shareholders in ADAMOS – ADAptive Manufacturing Open Solutions – an alliance with very big ambitions in terms of Industry 4.0.
The four founding members of the alliance launched the ADAMOS platform for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in October 2017 and are now seeking to establish it as a global standard.
Independent
ADAMOS is providing state-of-the-art software and solutions, independent of specific software vendors. The basic functionality offered is in the core areas of device connectivity and management, real-time analytics and visualisation, workflow automation and enterprise and cloud integration.
As an open and manufacturer-neutral IIoT platform it is paving the way to digitally networked manufacturing and intelligent services around existing products for machinery and plant engineering enterprises, as well as for their customers and suppliers.
The platform is available on demand as a cloud service for all partners and is infrastructure-independent, in order to be operated flexibly with any infrastructure provider.
“Digital disruption is the number one obsession of today’s executives and is haunting every industry,” says Eric Duffaut, chief customer officer of founding partner Software AG. “Just consider this – half of the Fortune 500 companies from the year 2000 have disappeared. Digital Darwinism has indeed arrived and is accelerating.
“Technology is advancing at a speed never before experienced and radical changes are now impacting the whole product design and manufacturing process – from service delivery and consumption to post sales maintenance and upgrades. Almost every product will become a smart product.”
Assembly Hall at Karl Mayer’s Obertshausen HQ in Germany
Big data
Enterprises, no matter what size, Duffaut adds, must harness an ever-widening portfolio of technologies in order to form their own unique strategies for innovation – strategies that can be changed quickly, in real-time if necessary.
“In order to protect their markets and explore new digital possibilities, companies must recognise the importance of data,” he says. “It is possibly a company’s biggest non-tangible asset, if not its biggest asset. The Industrial Internet has connected enterprises, their customers and their products, resulting in the advent of big data and the ability to measure, analyse and control facets of life that were simply mysteries a decade ago. These huge volumes of data are now driving machine learning and the incredible power of artificial intelligence. This makes data the single most valuable asset an enterprise can have.”
Europe, he adds, has taken a fundamentally different approach to software development the US.
Although only one European company is among the ten biggest software companies in the world, this is not the full story. Many European conglomerates have thousands of in-house developers and could be considered Europe’s largest software companies – automotive OEMs, white goods manufacturers and large engineering and machinery companies are rapidly adopting industrial internet technologies. German industry is planning to invest up to €40bn each year until 2020 in this area.
Antonia Gottschalk, head of digitisation at Karl Mayer and managing director of
Karl Mayer Digital Factory GmbH
Co-innovation
“This shift back to in-house development is also altering the software vendor and customer relationship from a product-based approach to a strategic partnership,” says Duffaut. “This is where the software industry must step up to the plate and where ADAMOS comes in, in elevating the concept of co-innovation.
“It is bringing the machine industry and software industry together, focusing on the industrial machine sector and developing industry specific IoT standards and shared services across a wide ecosystem. As such, it lowers the IIoT entry barriers to manufacturing companies everywhere, reduces risk and allows for experimentation using state-of-the-art technologies. It allows for every manufacturing company to accelerate its transformation into a software company, no matter what size.”
Influential
Karl Mayer, with annual sales of over €500m and more than 2,300 employees in Germany and at its subsidiaries around the world, is linking with some extremely influential organisations as part of ADAMOS.
Karl Mayer knitting machine
Its fellow members are:
• Zeiss – the €5.4bn leader in optical systems, industrial measurement technology and medical devices.
• Dürr, headquartered in Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany, one of the world’s leading mechanical and plant engineering firms with significant automation and robotics expertise. Around 55% of Dürr’s 2017 sales of €3.7bn were to the automotive industry.
• DMG Mori, one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of cutting machine tools and a manufacturer of CNC-controlled lathes and milling machines. Headquartered in Bielefeld, Germany, and with 2017 sales of over €2.3bn, the company’s products include machines, industrial services and software and energy solutions.
• Software AG, an enterprise software company with over 10,000 customers in over 70 countries. The company is the second largest software vendor in Germany, and the seventh largest in Europe, with 2017 sales of €879m.
• Hong Kong headquartered, ASM Pacific Technology, a leading integrated solutions provider to the semiconductor and electronics industries, with sales in 2017 of €2.25bn.
• Schwertberg, Austria headquartered Engel, one of the leading manufacturers of injection moulding machinery for the plastics industry, with 2017 sales of €1.5bn.
Digital Factory
Last November, Karl Mayer formed a new business, Karl Mayer Digital Factory GmbH, for the fast and flexible development of new digital solutions for the IIoT, to offer perceptible added value for customers.
“In the digital world as in general business, only those offers which can best satisfy consumer demands are successful,” says Antonia Gottschalk, head of digitisation at Karl Mayer and managing director of Karl Mayer Digital Factory GmbH. “This is the reason why we consistently focus on customer benefits and combine our long-standing experience as leading textile machinery manufacturer with new, digital know-how.”
“Joining the strategic ADAMOS alliance is the next step in our digitisation strategy. ADAMOS brings together experts in mechanical engineering and information technology to help provide high added value for customers. With this involvement we will gain access to an open IIoT environment that is specifically focused on the needs of machinery and plant construction.”
In June this year, ADAMOS claimed the German Innovation Award in the Business to Business category. It was selected from a total of 390 entries.
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