digital factory Archives

April 3, 2025 · Additive Manufacturing

Why Circular Manufacturing Needs Automation, AI, and Modular Design to Compete

At Hannover Messe 2025, Ali Haj Fraj, Senior Vice President of the Digital Factory at Schneider Electric, offers a compelling perspective on one of the most pressing industrial challenges: how to balance sustainability with global competitiveness. His answer? Don’t treat them as opposing forces. Instead, treat sustainability as a core driver of performance.Rethinking the Sustainability–Competitiveness Trade-OffToo often, […]

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April 19, 2022 · Smart Manufacturing

4 Steps to Building a Digital Factory

Manufacturers, from automotive to electronics, recognize the need to evolve their factories into flexible, customer-centric operations. The benefits are too strong to ignore. Once digitally transformed, factories can bring information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT) together to deliver the actionable intelligence they need to improve performance, increase economic returns and respond more quickly to […]

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April 3, 2019 · Connected Industry

3 Practical Ways to Transform Brownfield Plants into Digital Factories

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), industries around the world are undergoing a major digital transformation. In their 2017 research, Capgemini reported that smart factories could contribute an annual added value of $500 billion to $1.5 trillion to the world economy in the next five years. In parallel, manufacturers predicted that overall […]

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September 17, 2018 · Connected Industry

Industrie 4.0 Is All About Speed

Visit four doctors, and you’ll come home with five diagnoses. This saying can be transferred to the term Industry 4.0, where everybody has its own definition. Back in 2011 when the term Industrie 4.0 was introduced by the German government institution BMBF, the idea was very unique. It describes the fourth industrial revolution (after steam, […]

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