The Pen | Wolfgang Heuring, CEO Motion Control Business Unit Siemens

Analyze, visualize, optimize

Making machine tools produce faster with less energy, more flexibility and higher quality. This is what we are all looking for, because your customers' expectations will only increase in the coming years. To make this happen, the virtual and real worlds will have to grow ever closer together, including in your workplace. Whether you are a sole proprietor or a multinational. By creating a digital fingerprint of your machine tools, your production will become more transparent than ever.

The intelligence of the smartphone is more than just its processor. It is the apps on it that give you the potential to make your life more enjoyable or efficient, as you wish. With today's machine technology, it's really nothing different. With Sinumerik Edge and MindSphere, we offer a platform of apps, in production or in the cloud, that will make your machine tools run better. How do you ask? Everything starts with a digital twin of your product, your tool and machine tool. Because of the intensive work manufacturers have already done in this area, much of this data is already available today.

The task now is to check off how everything performs on paper and how they perform together in reality. Using the information present in Sinumerik, you can start making a digital fingerprint of your machining process. After all, every movement is captured at a high frequency: of the workpiece, of the tool and of the axes. So you no longer have to worry about integrating additional sensors. By simply using what is present in the machine, you can already create a digital twin of your production process, in which each machine tool has its own performance. Transparency thus becomes a fact, not unimportant for those who supply the aerospace industry, for example.

Depending on how deep you want to dig into your process to raise that quality and efficiency, then it's the turn of those famous apps. Basically, these are small programs that are going to transform the data, the raw data gathered around a particular process into knowledge. They make the translation so you can transform data into added value. You don't even have to go to the cloud to do that. The Sinumerik Edge platform allows you to work with it on premise. So it's a way to adjust critical processes in real time as needed. Is the tool running a little too hot? Is a workpiece threatening to fall out of tolerance? The controller receives the information back, so that intervention is still possible before you are faced with scrap. And this is a continuous process in which both the product and the production process learn from each other and undergo optimizations. That is the true power of digitization.