Process industries: pain points, challenges, and solutions

Process industries: pain points, challenges, and solutions | SPONSORED

Siemens recently made a few major announcements, including the launch of the Xcelerator platform. Find out how this platform will help the process industry in an exclusive interview with Mr. Steffen Wagner, the CTO of Process Automation and Senior Vice President at The Digital Enterprise at Siemens AG.

Lucian Fogoros: What is one thing a decision-maker in the process industry should know about Siemens Xcelerator and why?

Steffen Wagner: Siemens Xcelerator Business Platform is the place to go whenever you need ideas, solutions, or answers. Everything is in one place to support decision-makers. Information, partners, and solutions, all fitting together perfectly. It’s a comprehensive curated portfolio that includes digital and IoT-enabled offerings from Siemens and certified partners. We offer them as a service, flexible, interoperable, open, and cyber secure. It is a continuously growing, robust ecosystem of partners. It’s a marketplace to explore, get educated, and exchange ideas with a community of customers, partners, developers, and, of course, to purchase products, solutions, and services.

Lucian Fogoros: How will this platform help solve your customers’ most pressing issues?

Steffen Wagner: Looking at the trends and talking to our customers, we understand that at the moment, they need to improve their quality of work and/or products. They need to reduce their costs, become faster, and comply with sustainability standards. With the Xcelerator business platform, we are making digitalization transformation easier, faster, and at scale.

Lucian Fogoros: Are manufacturers in the process industries ready to migrate to the cloud and adopt subscription models for daily operations?

Steffen Wagner: Some manufacturers are enthusiastic, but others still want on-premises and local solutions. This is why we strive to offer on-premises, cloud, edge, and hybrid solutions for our customers to meet their current needs. But as we go through industry changes and we use more artificial intelligence to optimize processes, plants, and fleets, manufacturers will be more willing to use the cloud to leverage the data to make better decisions.

Lucian Fogoros: Where will digital transformation technology be in five years, and how will we adapt?

Steffen Wagner: I think we will make more and more data-driven decisions. Data is the new oil and the key to the future. This means technology will focus on being interoperable, open, and standardized. I mentioned this already.

Lucian Fogoros: What’s next for you as CTO of a giant? What’s next for Siemens Process Automation Division?

Steffen Wagner: The Xcelerator business platform and the ideas behind it are fascinating and inspiring to me. I want to continue to build a community for the process automation division. And I would also love to create partners, build an ecosystem, and put customers in the driver’s seat.

Lucian Fogoros: Can you expand on a particular example of how this works?

Steffen Wagner: We have recently started a project with Merck and are currently working together to boost trusted traceability for machine-to-machine connectivity. The objective of this collaboration between Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, and Siemens is the joint development of an overall system for automating the modular production of tomorrow.

With the new technology platform, production plants can be adapted quickly and flexibly to ever-changing demands, saving the industry time and resources and contributing to sustainability.