Celebrating Success
Published on : Saturday 05-11-2022
The term Mittelstand in general refers to small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany that share a common work ethic.
The Mittelstand employs about 78 percent of the German work force and makes up 53 percent of Germany's GDP. There are 3.5 million Mittelstand companies in Germany. India, on the other hand has 63 million MSMEs but over 94% of them employ less than 10 persons. Apart from a handful of large companies like Siemens and Bosch, the majority of German companies operating in India are Mittelstand companies. One common thread running through these enterprises is their high spends on R&D in quest of innovation. These companies have also wholeheartedly embraced Industry 4.0, the concept birthed and promoted by the German government in close cooperation with the technical universities and research institutions. Industrial Automation visited two such companies at Pune last month, and returned impressed. There is much to learn from them, for our MSME segment, in terms of evolution, which is a continuous process.
While on the topic of embracing Industry 4.0, the factory of the future will be characterised by autonomous operations. It is said that in the smart factory, only the walls and roof of the shop floor would be fixed, and the rest movable. In this scenario, intralogistics – the in-plant movement of machinery and materials – holds impressive potential for process optimisation. By using the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), logistics processes are increasingly becoming more autonomous, the topic of more relevance than ever before. Materials and goods need to be moved quickly to avoid downtimes or disruption in production or delivery. The Cover Story of this edition of Industrial Automation looks closely at the emerging trends in intralogistics. It is complemented by a number of articles and viewpoints, how technology is changing the layout of the modern shop floor.
