display
Gerlingen (dpa) - The technology group Bosch is relying on rapidly growing business with networked applications for industry in the coming years.
For the time after the corona pandemic, the aim is to jump in sales of up to ten percent annually in this area, said Rolf Najork, the Bosch managing director responsible for industrial technology, of the German press agency.
Last year, Bosch generated around 700 million euros with networked solutions for production, a little less than in 2019 due to the pandemic. If you look at the past ten years since the concept of Industry 4.0 was introduced, Bosch has around four billion euros in sales.
The Gerling-based company currently puts the number of its customers in this area at 500. Above all, intelligent software for production control, networked drive and control technology, flexible robotics and digital assistance systems find many customers.
"Already today there is practically no company left that does not plan its processes with an extreme degree of IT and optimize its production accordingly," says Najork.
But the growth potential for the next few years is even greater in the area of Industry 4.0.
Soon, in many branches of industry, the main focus will no longer be on networking existing production systems, i.e. simply optimizing them.
"Instead, companies have to completely redesign their production facilities."
The trend is towards self-learning robotic systems that are “modular, charge energy inductively, produce a wide variety of things, and communicate with each other via the fast 5G cellular standard,” said Najork.
He cited the food, fashion and medical industries as examples, where the number of individualized products will soon increase sharply.
display
Bosch believes that it is on the right track with the digitization of its own locations.
In the meantime, a large part of the 240 plants around the world are using Industry 4.0 applications “to a relevant extent”, said Najork.
Around 85 percent of all parts production and assembly lines at the Gerlingen-based company are now networked.
The Bosch plants had around 120,000 networked machines and more than 250,000 networked end devices such as integrated cameras and robots.
The term Industry 4.0 stands for the fourth industrial revolution, which is intended to network people, machines and products with one another using information and communication technology. In essence, this way, for example, production processes can be simplified, delivery routes accelerated and costs saved, but also highly individualized solutions produced with little effort.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210408-99-123787 / 2