PTC announced Thursday several new initiatives that advance its Industrie 4.0 strategy and will enable manufacturers to unlock value from the physical-digital convergence and transform their operational systems. These include a collaboration with McKinsey & Company; strategic Industrie 4.0 work with acatech, the German national academy of science and engineering; and the upcoming release of connected operations applications built on the ThingWorx IoT platform.
Known collectively as Industrie 4.0, the concept is now worldwide in scope. It is also the blueprint for Made in China 2025 and influences smart manufacturing initiatives in the United States.
While it is most often associated with manufacturing, adjacent market segments, including utilities, smart cities, oil and gas, and healthcare, have begun to embrace Industrie 4.0 principles and technologies.
The PTC Industrie 4.0 initiatives include partnerships with management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, to create a global network of Industrie 4.0 Digital Capability Centers (DCCs). Using solution technology from PTC, the DCCs are designed to support companies at every stage of their digital transformation journey.
The DCCs will include a realistic production environment, digital showcases with demonstrations of Industrie 4.0 technology, as well as experiential capability-building workshops to promote skills training and awareness of Industrie 4.0.
The first DCC has opened to visitors in Aachen (Germany), followed by other DCC openings in Singapore, Beijing, Chicago, and Venice (Italy). In addition to McKinsey & Company, other PTC partners in Industrie 4.0 initiatives include manufacturing leaders GE, National Instruments, and OSIsoft. In addition, PTC and Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) are collaborating to develop new IoT solutions for industrial use cases.
PTC, as a member of the acatech consortium, the German national academy of science and engineering, contributed to the development of the Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index that will enable companies to assess their current Industrie 4.0 capabilities and map out a structured digital roadmap that includes steps and capabilities needed to realize its value potential. The Index also will provide a unique multidimensional assessment that covers production and logistics, research and development, service, and sales and marketing.
PTC will deliver new connected operations applicationsthat support Industrie 4.0. The new applications, built on the ThingWorx platform, are designed to unify and contextualize digital data from enterprise IT systems with operational and physical data from machines and sensors to enable manufacturers to realize Industrie 4.0 potential more quickly.
