Talking SaaS, AI, and a digital twin at Siemens Realize Live 2023
In a recent interview, Industrial Machinery Digest (IMD) speaks with Rahul Garg, VP of Industrial Machinery and SMB Program at Siemens Digital Industries Software, at the Siemens Realize LIVE 2023 convention providing a valuable interaction of responses. Realize LIVE is a gathering of users, suppliers, customers, and media to discuss, innovate, and realize the impact of digital transformation in our world today.
The interview focuses on Siemens current position in the digital solutions space, discussing requirements through manufacturing support, spanning the complete product lifecycle.
“Getting products to market faster has never been more important. How fast can they get this done? They know the need and don’t have a choice. How fast can they get a development implementation done? How fast can they get all the things done they are envisioning” asks Garg.
A holistic view of products, embracing Software as an enabler
There are reasons for this urgency compared to three or four years ago. Firstly, Covid was an essential factor, creating the realization that something needs to change. It became the catalyst for taking a holistic view of products and becoming more competitive via automation and software. It’s the provision to accept and embrace more software content as an enabler with configuration management across all other systems.
Configuration management is the disparate teams working together. However, before COVID, some companies had large engineering rooms in one facility. You could still talk to the other guy in the other corner to resolve an issue. However, COVID changed this scenario, with having to make a phone call and create a Teams session.
Software-as-a-Service enables speed to market
Getting products to market faster is of supreme importance, including implementation development. New capabilities such as Software as a Service (SaaS) in the cloud support clock speed or the rate at which it performs internal operations and is conveyed in cycles per second. The vision of Siemens Xcelerator enables us to go through the entire lifecycle faster and more effectively across multiple companies.
A customer in Germany managed all their I/O interfaces in a spreadsheet. Making gear grinding machines with 200 PLC control points, and every point was addressed in that spreadsheet. This meant that the spreadsheet would update every time they made a change.
Also, a version of that specific PLC code had to be managed along with all the other pieces. This process was their mode of operation for 15 years. So, how do you ensure all changes are made by their 20 engineers and copied into the spreadsheet when a machine is being shipped to convey accurately in the as-shipped version? What is shipped could be a completely different version, and you no longer have the code. Therefore, the provision to accept and embrace software content is one of the enablers of clock speed, using configuration management for the hardware bill of material and across all these other systems.
Now there is a complete systems view, number one, across the company lifecycle. And the configuration is changing, and more rapidly. In the past, there were concerns about the structure during the development cycle when being built. Now that the machine is in operation, there is a different configuration. So now the lifecycle of that equipment has grown more, and you need to ensure all the changes have been appropriately incorporated.
AI and a digital twin monitor parameter
AI also has a significant role. At Hannover Messe, it was shown how Teams and Microsoft are integrating with the rest of the engineering and development systems. Teams is a straightforward user interface, as is audio systems. You can easily talk into your phone and capture the issue, and it gets sent to an engineer to solve it while the engineer tracks it on a physical system. Siemens has the entire IoT-based solutions, tracking, real-time monitoring, and analytics of what is going on in the background.
You also have an operational digital twin that can monitor any parameter, from temperature to vibration to noise pre-indicators to potential problems. When you sense a vibration, you know it will lead to a temperature impact. And that temperature leads to something not working correctly. It is going to heat up, and it’s going to break. So, you are catching it ahead of time in real time.
Therefore, you can view trends to determine where a system is going. It’s predictive diagnostics. So, the challenge is the adoption curve. How quickly can the industry use it, and what are the challenges of operational-level details?
“The technology is there. Now, how do you operationalize it? A simple example is a lot of the capabilities that we talked about, so many of our customers on the industrial machinery side many times don’t sell the equipment directly to the end user. There are distributors in-between as well. These distributors are also the ones providing a lot of the service,” says Rahul.
It’s a Value-Added Reseller (VAR). If something breaks, you need someone to change the code or belt. The creator must inform this person and the OEM of the equipment. The end-user is concerned as well. You want to avoid all your data going to various companies on how you’re using this machine, so these are operational-level concerns that people are still working through.
Learn more in the IMD article.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
