10 000 visitors: the Rittal Innovation Center is a crowd magnet

Three years after its opening, the Rittal Innovation Center in Haiger welcomed its 10 000th visitor this summer. The great interest in live presentations and training sessions taking place at the Innovation Center demonstrates the high level of interest in innovations in control and switchgear construction. On an area of over 1 500 m², Rittal, EPLAN and Cideon are unpacking the consistent implementation of Industrie 4.0 concepts. The presentation and training center is unique in the industry and is constantly being developed and expanded.

Is the Industrie 4.0 concept implementable in control and cabinetry? Which process steps can become significantly more adequate? Is efficient production at single-series sizes feasible? These types of questions are keeping the industry busy worldwide.

Due to increasing efficiency and cost price requirements, there is a need for practical and quickly implementable solutions. "We want to specifically assist our customers in the further development of their value-added processes," explains Jan-Henry Schall, head of the Rittal Innovation Center. "The extensive influx of visitors to our Innovation Center since September 2016 proves that there is a great need for solutions for process optimization in control and enclosure construction. We also clearly notice that our interested visitors are most in need of exchanging technical information with experts."

Tangible presentation of the value chain

To meet this need, care is taken to ensure that customers and visitors can view, experience and test the latest solutions for their own value chains in the innovation and training center and discuss them with experts from the Friedhelm Loh Group. To give them a tangible and insightful experience, the Friedhelm Loh Group installed a fictitious working switchgear. "This setting gives visitors a real picture of the solutions we can offer at every single process step - from engineering, through production planning, goods receipt, machining, assembly, wire processing and cabling to the finished switchgear. Industry professionals thus quickly recognize the many possible benefits," explains Jan-Henry Schall.

Visitors will gain insight into "virtual prototyping" of a complete digital switchgear system, where the latest software solutions from Rittal and EPLAN for electrical design were used. Interfaces in the commercial processes and especially in the subsequent production phase at the installer are another important part of the presentation. Furthermore, visitors can get up close and personal with technologies from Rittal and EPLAN that are of interest for production, i.e. the installer's workshop. Both fully and partially automated technologies as well as digitally supported solutions for manual process steps are covered here.