BROWSING: smart factories

The World Economic Forum has added 15 new ‘smart’ manufacturing sites to its ‘global lighthouse network’, and claimed production output among Industry 4.0 leaders spiralled upwards by 93 percent in the past year, through the Covid-era. New joiners include factories owned by Bosch, Foxconn,...

German test and assurance company Rohde & Schwarz has combined with Germany’s Industrial Radio Lab (IRL) in Dresden to investigate industrial 5G for mobile robots and automated guided vehicles (AGVs), among other Industry 4.0 use cases. Rohde & Schwarz said it has provided network scanners...

Bosch is on track to deliver “zero-defect production”, the company has said, after announcing an AI system to detect anomalies and malfunctions in manufacturing which is already delivering savings of €2 million per year in a number of test sites, and is to be...

Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom are bundling private cellular and edge computing into an integrated ‘campus’ networking package for enterprises globally. The pair are offering the same in Germany, already; their new deal extends to a global market. Ericsson is providing the LTE and 5G...

Note, this post is continued from an article called, "5G helped us through Covid’ – Lufthansa Technik on private 5G with Nokia, Vodafone". Click here to see the previous instalment. But this is not about how a nascent technology will save your business. That is...

Ericsson is to deploy a standalone private 5G network at a Ford engine plant in Valencia, in Spain. The trial installation is part of a European Union initiative to drive Industry 4.0 development. It puts focus on wireless control of autonomous automated guided vehicles...

Bosch said this week it has so far sold 10 million connected power tools, home appliances, and heating systems, and has added about €300 million in revenue by adding artificial intelligence (AI) to its product line since setting up an AI division three years...

The capability works with radio slicing of public 5G networks, for carriers to offer and guarantee virtual private (or ‘dedicated’) mobile networks; it also works with radio slicing of dedicated and hybrid private networks, using privately-licensed spectrum managed by enterprises themselves, or by mobile...

The parallel narratives around cellular 5G and Industry 4.0 are about to collide. China has said it will build 30 brand new ‘smart factories’ by 2023, all of them threaded with 5G. If ever there was a signpost for this (telco-styled version of a)...

In 2021, increasing availability of 5G will provide the launching pad for manufacturing to truly evolve to Industry 4.0, the new industrial revolution that will push industries forward. Connected factories will move from isolated pilot programs and early test cases to truly integrated ecosystems,...

2021 will be the year industrial IoT gets ‘massive’, when companies decide, after the impact of Covid-19, to make change, and to accelerate their digital transformation. In technology terms, a major driver of this ‘massification’ will be 5G, and in particular private deployments of...

The coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis has changed the way we work like no event or crisis before. What it has shown is that digitization of the industrial sector, and of factories in particular, is required as a matter of urgency, in order to bring flexible...

Aerospace and defence company Saab has deployed a factory-wide private 5G network at a manufacturing plant in Sweden. The facility in Linköping, in the south of the country, produces ‘aerostructures’, notably for Airbus and Boeing.  The deployment has been organised by Swedish tech consultancy Combitech...

Bosch has put live a private 5G network with Nokia at its factory in Stuttgart-Feuerbach, and confirmed another at its research campus in Renningen. The firm said it will “gradually” deploy 5G in all 250 of its factories around the world. Bosch has been arguably...

  The Australian government announced it is investing almost AUD30 million ($21.2 million) to improve the allocation and management of spectrum and trial 5G use across different industry sectors. This investment is part of the government’s Job Maker Digital Business Plan, which aims to accelerate the...

Australian satellite communications provider Speedcast International has signed a deal with Nokia to offer the Finnish vendor’s plug-and-play private LTE and 5G solution to remote industrial customers. Speedcast supplies satellite-based networking solutions to the manufacturing, supply chain, mining, utilities, and oil and gas sectors,...

Arm has introduced a suite of new safety-critical computing solutions for autonomous systems in the automotive and industrial sectors. The UK-based firm said its new silicon design blueprints are designed for high-powered computing scenarios where safety is a critical factor. In particular, it highlighted...

France-based energy management and automation specialist Schneider Electric has deployed the first private indoor 5G network in the industrial sector in France. The firm has worked with mobile operator Orange and telecoms vendor Nokia. The network utilises “experimental frequencies”. The network has been live at...

Ten new manufacturing sites have joined the World Economic Forum’s ‘global lighthouse network’ of Industry 4.0 leaders. It takes the total number of smart factories in the network to 54. The new joiners include factories owned by Alibaba, Unilever, Renault, Saudi Aramco, and Schneider...

Danish engineering firm Danfoss is piloting a private LTE network at its factory in Vaasa, in the northwest of Finland. It is working with Finnish systems integrator Etteplan, which has partnered with country-mates Nokia and Edzcom on the project. The pilot started in January,...

As the headline suggests, this analysis should be seen in context. It offers only rapid arithmetic around the World Economic Forum’s (expanding) list of ‘lighthouse’ factories, which claim the most success with digital change. It considers the available data (the location and ownership of...

The World Economic Forum has named 18 new factories, mostly from Asia (and mostly in China), as part of its ‘global lighthouse network’ of advanced manufacturers. They join the existing roster of 26 factories. All of the sites have been assessed by consultancy McKinsey &...

Ericsson exec discusses outlook for industrial adoption of 5G LOS ANGELES--Ericsson’s Erik Josefsson, head of advanced industries, is a surfer, he told Enterprise IoT Insights this week during Mobile World Congress. And, as such, he analogized industrial adoption of private networking in terms of waves.  “We’ve...

Deloitte has launched a pre-configured suite of cloud-based IoT applications designed to accelerate smart factory transformations for companies with manufacturing operations. Powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT, the Smart Factory Fabric suite of services is aimed at helping industrial companies improve their operational performance and reduce...