Hannover Messe Report: Let's Get Digital

The Monday morning opening of Hannover Messe must have been a huge challenge for security services. Angela Merkel and Barack Obama visited a number of exhibits together. Here they are looking at a new condition monitoring sensor designed for retrofit on installed motors. While the required security caused headaches for many visitors, I did find it inspiring that 2 heads of state would visit an industrial trade fair. After the leaders departed, visitors (and analysts) could begin their work in earnest.

There is so much to see here that any report seems anecdotal, but in terms of things I encountered that I found striking here are a few:

A thoughtful question posed to Klaus Helmrich, member of the Managing Board of Siemens asked his opinion about a "tipping point" where manufacturers began to embrace the architectures of Industrie 4.0. His response was that usually it occurred as manufacturers fully digitized their product design process. Why? Because (continuing in my words, not those of Mr. Helmrich) this enables much deeper interaction between the activities of product engineering and manufacturing engineering -- to the point where integrated simulations of the manufacturing process enable far more intelligent and iterative trade-offs to be made during the design phases, at far greater speed and at far lower cost. This also explains the gap that exists between various vertical industries in embracing and benefiting from I4.0. In some verticals the need to digitize the product design process is imperative. In others it seems less important and also, perhaps, much more difficult.

On the hardware front the more innovative products indicate that there is still a lot of future impact from Moore's Law.  Products like PLCs and devices take longer to show this.  But industrial PCs,  IoT gateways, and network infrastructure evolve more quickly as more powerful and capacious chips become available.  I was particularly struck by a very small-form IPC product which was designed as a platform for virtualization despite its very small size.   Manufacturing professionals need to keep in mind that the IT world faces ongoing disruption from virtualization, cloud computing, software defined networks, and new open source technologies. These changes may reach manufacturing before many people expect.

Finally on the device level, I saw a demonstration of  integrated operation of fieldbus and Ethernet field networks where the infrastructure was intelligent enough to interrogate each device and configure it automatically to the greatest extent that the particular device could support. For end users, a clear migration path from today's installed base of devices is perhaps the most important feature of such new field network infrastructure products.