Manufacturing

The European Funding Project FENIX connects different pilot regions and transport corridors, to do so the project relies on the know-how of T-Systems.

In Industry 4.0, Germany has a globally recognized brand. Many countries have defined strategies for orienting production to German standards.

The value chain of production in German industry is made up of many different individual segments. For example, a component supplier produces a wide variety of goods, which are then sold to many different machine suppliers. These suppliers manufacture machines that are later used in production. If one imagines the production chains in industry, they resemble a puzzle to whose different parts only individual actors have access and which produces diverse types of data.

In beverage production, all parties involved are interdependent. For example, a farmer who grows apples and wants to sell them as juice is dependent on the bottle manufacturer and a juice bottler.

A wide variety of materials are used in production. In order to minimize storage times and costs, the materials must be “just-in-time”; – at the right time – in the right place.

Data monetization is promised to be the next big thing. Analysts and consultants are promising hundreds of billions in revenue (e.g., McKinsey 2016). Her excellence the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is addressing the downside, sternly warning German industry to catch up: “If we let this element of value creation be taken out of our hands, then it will be a rude awakening for Germany as an industrial country” (Merkel 2019, link, at 13:17).

This is not a story about superstars or the world’s leading automaker. Instead, it is a story about a medium-sized company; a story about a German medium-sized company, the type that collectively forms the backbone of the German economy, the 4th largest of the world.

Data is promised to be the next big business (e.g., Wall 2019, Gartner 2018a). Investment banks, analysts and consultants further feed the frenzy with big revenue forecasts. In terms of data monetization opportunities, consultants McKinsey & Company estimate that car-generated data alone will be worth between US$450 billion and US$750 billion by 2030, less than two vehicle generations away (McKinsey 2016). Consumer data is already a big business today. Google and Facebook live off the data that users create on their platforms. Almost all their revenue is from advertising, selling “eyeballs” and user engagement to advertisers.

Time is money – this applies in particular to the logistics industry. If the highly complex cycle between industrial, trading and logistics companies and end consumers comes to a standstill, the consequences will be serious.