When it comes to the networking of machinery and equipment, everything is usually sunshine and roses: Fully developed and reliable bus systems, such as PROFINET, ensure a trouble-free communication. However, in order to keep dark clouds away from the communication with the cloud, there are now new concepts for connecting the field level. Background Higher […]

MindSphere and Industrial Edge will define the new structure of data processing for the factories. In this context, edge computing is used to optimize our cloud computing system by performing data processing at the edge of the network, which means, near to the source of the data. (Read my previous blogs for a general introduction […]

The data lake concept by itself is not new, nevertheless, some organizations struggle to understand the concept as many of them might still be caught up in the traditional paradigm of Enterprise Data Warehouses. James Dixon, founder and CTO of Pentaho was the first who used the expression “Data Lake” and explained it as follows:  […]

Within Siemens like in many other companies, it is sometimes not so easy to harvest the potential of digitalization to full scale due to installed proprietary software solutions, customized processes, non-standardized interfaces and mixed technologies. But for us, this doesn’t mean that we must run a tremendous standardization program before we can use the possibilities […]

The chief objective of ‘leanness’ in manufacturing is to eliminate waste, i.e. anything that does not create added value. One of the chief challenges for lean production is to identify these wasted resources. And here big data holds the key. To leverage this we will connect more than 30 of our own factories to one […]