Berlin IOT: Industrialize Your Data Takes Center Stage

At the Industry of Things World event in Berlin in September, leaders from across the industrial world came together to talk about the broad impact of the digitization of manufacturing. Many of the talks covered the overall industry transformation, with changes in product design and process and, of course, sensors and sensor data to improve efficiency and quality.

Some examples included:

• Dr. Roland Busch, Deputy CEO of Siemens – Dr. Busch talked about the opportunities for the industry to better serve customers and rethink design. He said that this is all made possible if you “start with the data and end with the data.”
• Hermann Bach, SVP Innovation, Covestro – Mr. Bach talked about the end-to-end opportunity and how, at Covestro, one of the world’s leading plastics manufacturers, they have a “new digital team that is 17,000 people strong—the whole company.”
• Anes Hodžić, AIRBUS – This discussion was about putting “workers at the center of the universe,” that silos of data were the “fundamental problem” and breaking them down to get workers the data they need drives “multiple outcomes across the business.”

These themes were also part of the small group discussions in the “Challenge Your Peer” and “World Café” sessions. For more on the sessions and talks, including Schneider Electric, Thyssenkrupp, ZF Group, Dow, Bayer and Heideldruck, check out my Twitter stream.

Data played a part in all of these these discussions, but it wasn’t the main agenda item. In my talk at the event, “Industrialize Your Data to Deliver Industry 4.0,” I wanted to bring data to the front of the conversation and focused on the following:

• The importance of data as one of the most important assets in the digitization of the industry
• The complexity of the current IT stack and how adding IOT and digital twins on TOP of it all is just making things more complex
• How datacentric thinking design and investing in data can let organizations take a different aproach, simplify the stack and use their data in an integrated way
• How this strategy is being adopted by industry leaders like Airbus, Eaton and Chevron and the impact of their data    projects on creating better products, navigating complexity and transforming for the future

You can see the slides from my talk here, and you can see Dr. Busch’s talk here.

The Industry of Things World team will be in Boston on November 7-8. Join them if you can.

On November 14, I’ll be co-hosting a webinar on the same topic as my Berlin IOT talk. Hosted by IndustryWeek, “Industrialize Your Data to Deliver Industry 4.0” will feature John Carrier from the MIT Sloan School of Business and me. We’ll look at the strategic value of data and some of the practical examples we’ve seen of industrial organizations that truly leverage their data.

Sign up here to join the webinar.

The Berlin IOT was just the start of the data conversation to bring data to the front of the Industry 4.0 and digitization conversation. I hope you can join the webinar coming up, and you can always get the latest on the role data is playing across the industrial world on this page.

Thanks,

Matt Turner, CSO for Manufacturing