BERLIN: If customers of Germany’s Harting Group, a maker of industrial plugs and sockets, want bespoke products, they can buy them — if they’re prepared to assemble them from a kit themselves.
Volker Franke, the head of Harting’s assembly systems and machine tools business, is working hard to change that. His team is developing an automated production line that takes orders online and makes plugs to a customer’s individual specification.
Harting is one of a growing number of German firms investing in software, fearing their excellence in mechanical precision and reliability — the trademarks of “Made in Germany” valued by factory owners around the world — will not be enough to guarantee them success for much longer.
As computerised technology becomes an ever greater part of industrial processes, Internet companies are starting to eclipse low-cost Chinese manufacturers as German engineers’ main worry.
With the likes of Google investing heavily in robotics and automated driving, the fear is engineers will be relegated to selling generic hardware, while software firms make it rich with the technology that makes the machinery smart.
Right now there are makers of factory equipment and those who buy, operate and look after it. Who guarantees that it stays that way?” asked Franke during a Reuters visit to Harting’s headquarters in Espelkamp, northwest Germany.
It could be that somebody will squeeze their way between the two, telling the equipment user he won’t have to bother about what type of machines to use any more. This service provider will be from the digital world,” he said.
Companies that can master vast amounts of data such as Google, SAP, Amazon, EMC Corp’s cloud-computing division Pivotal and Teradata Corp could all open up the breach, industry analysts believe.
Advisory firms such as IBM and Cap Gemini and software makers such as Oracle and Microsoft could also be winners from an industrial Internet revolution, potentially to the detriment of engineers.
