BROWSING: Smart Factory

A new industrial consortium including SAP and Siemens has convened to help industrial organisations go beyond the ‘pilot trap’ with their Industry 4.0 deployments. The Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) and German testing and certification company TÜV Süd have recruited SAP and Siemens, alongside management...

UK tech incubator Digital Catapult is sponsoring a pair of UK firms to set up as Industry 4.0 showcase labs for the rest of the UK manufacturing industry. County Durham based fabrication and machining firm Dyer Engineering, and Hereford based superalloy manufacturer Special Metals Wiggin...

European aerospace firm Airbus has a 10-year back-log of orders, explains Sébastien Boria, R&D technology leader at Airbus. “Which means we have no problem selling aircraft.” Demand is high because the product is good, he says. The company, which has made strides as an innovator,...

I read it somewhere, and it made sense; the application of new digital technologies in the global supply chain is about two critical functions – ‘sensing’ and ‘sense-making’, where the first is about connecting and managing assets in transit, and the second is about...

Driverless trucks by equipment manufacturer Komatsu are the first in the mining industry to be passed to run on a private LTE network in commercial operations. Komatsu’s ‘autonomous haulage system’ (AHS), which governs unmanned operation of its ultra-class FrontRunner mining trucks, passed qualification after a...

Sigfox reckons is the only network technology in position to support battery-less devices for low-power wide-area (LPWA) IoT solutions, at least in early prototype mode today. Speaking with Enterprise IoT Insights, Bertrand Ramé, senior vice president of international operations at Sigfox, said the French IoT...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has opened a new Industry 4.0 ‘innovation lab’ for industrial IoT and edge compute projects in Geneva, Switzerland. The company said the new facility will bring a sharper competitive edge to its ‘converged edge’ portfolio, and commercial gains to partners. “The...

  The Swedish company acquired Etalon, a German provider of equipment calibration solutions   Swedish digital solutions company Hexagon has boosted its smart factory capabilities via the acquisition of Etalon, which provides equipment calibration solutions. Etalon’s solutions continuously monitor and initiate compensation of machine tools, measuring machines, robots...

Israel’s venture capital firm Magenta Venture Partners has announced a new $100 million fund for early-stage Israeli startups focused variously on autonomous vehicles, Industry 4.0, smart cities, and fin-tech, and on artificial intelligence and enterprise software. The new fund had its initial closing in October...

Further to last week’s sub-polemic on the wrongheaded marketing of 5G services, it is worth considering, again, just how transformational the next generation of mobile technology could be – and why the hype is building so feverishly in the first place. Of course, the only...

The World Economic Forum has expanded its list of the most advanced factories in the world, consolidating Europe’s position as the smartest region for manufacturing. China shores up its second place. The US and Middle East trail behind. In total, seven new ‘lighthouse’ factories (listed...

“The potential for 5G is awesome,” Verizon chief tech officer Kyle Malady wrote in an open letter this week, in protest at the early marketing of rather middle-of-the-road ‘5G’ services being pushed by the telecoms industry at large. “The potential to over-hype and under-deliver is...

China is to build 30 logistics hubs during the next 12 months and 150 in the following five years as part of a major expansion and transformation of its supply chain industry, according to a strategy document published last month by China’s state planning...

French IoT chipmaker Sequans has announced it will embed ‘cloud location over cellular’ (C-LoC) software to its LTE-M and NB-IoT Monarch platform, creating a IoT location solution that does not require GPS/ GNSS, or other radios for positioning. It has worked with C-LoC Polte...

The German government has created its own state-backed venture capital fund to drive the digital transformation of industry and stimulate enterprise innovation in its home market. The move comes as momentum appears to be building again for investments in the industrial IoT sector in the...

Calgary based industrial AI and IoT provider Osprey Informatics has raised $2.75 million ($3.75 CAD) from Shell Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Royal Dutch Shell, and Evok Innovations, the Silicon Valley startup fund. The investment round also saw participation also from InterGen Capital...

A slew of enterprise funds and venture capital has been staked on the enterprise-facing internet-of-things (IoT) sector in recent months, as vendors have got a better grasp of the technology and industrialists have got a better grip of digital transformation at last. Most investments in...

Siemens has been engaged to digitise and automate the new indoor stockyard for the Jiangsu Binxin Special Steel Material Company (Binxin Steel) in China. China’s moves in recent years to improve air quality in its urban centres has seen a push to move industrial stockyards...

The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the OpenFog Consortium (OpenFog), the largest international consortia in the industrial internet-of-things (IoT) and edge computing markets, have agreed to combine as one organisation. They said the timing is apt, as their areas of technology are complementary, crossing-over, and...

Qualcomm has launched its long-awaited 9205 LTE modem for internet-of-things (IoT) applications, combining cellular low-power wide-area (LPWA) LTE-M and NB-IoT connectivity, and support for IoT developers. Module makers Telit and Quectel were quick to announce products based on the 9205 integrated module. The new Qualcomm solution,...

Food cold storage operator Lineage Logistics has engaged IoT solution provider ndustrial.io and carrier AT&T to reduce annual energy usage by 34 per cent and annual energy costs by $4 million with sensors and data. Here’s how… Michigan based Lineage Logistics operates 120 warehouses in...

The digital transformation of manufacturing is about to break big, reckons US industrial IoT and AI startup MachineMetrics, after raising $11.3 million in Series A funding for its factory analytics solution. “Now is the internet moment for manufacturing,” stated William Bither, the company’s chief executive...

Note, this is the second part of an interview with Mentor Graphics; for the first instalment go here. For Siemens, Mentor Graphics' software capabilities with chip and board design, particularly the latter, was attractive, as the German company sought to build its digital-twinning offer as...

In a tucked-away corner of a hangar-like exhibition space in Munich, US electronic design automation (EDA) company Mentor Graphics is reflecting on its recent status, as a small but notable function within German mega-corp Siemens. “It probably sounds like a plug but I’ve got to...