How Siemens uses Agile Teams to Revolutionise Manufacturing
It’s February 2022, in Chippenham, UK. As workers get ready to start their morning shift, they are confronted with a supply shortage which has hit their Siemens’ Mobility factory hard: a critical microelectronics-part was supposed to arrive, but now the supplier has failed to deliver on time. The part is crucial for production, so now the factory is facing a production outage - a worst-case-scenario. Usually, this is a problem a factory has to face alone, but this time, something is different. The leader of the Siemens Mobility factory remembered a tool, which had been developed by another factory to solve this exact issue. Using this digital tool, he could see that another Siemens factory was using the same part and still had some surplus stock. A few emails and several days later, 200 pieces arrived from Vienna, Austria and the production in Chippenham could continue. Gunter Beitinger and Petra Monn, explain how Siemens, a huge company with over 120 factories, managed to coordinate this remarkable turnaround.
In October 2017, Siemens launched their Lean Digital Factory (LDF) program, which was founded to support the digital transformation of 30 Siemens Digital Industries factories. It has since become the seed for an even bigger project, an organisation at the corporate level under the name of Factory Digitalization (FD), which addresses more than 120 factories worldwide. The goal is to connect all factories with each other and accelerate production with the use of scalable digital solutions. This article gives an insight into the central organisation of the program and illustrates the approach with an example of a digital tool that helps factories to produce carbon neutral products.
Factory Digitalisation - An Enterprise approach to focus on scalability
The Siemens factories are sometimes called a bunch of plants, as manufacturing is very diverse among them. Not only do they differ in their manufactured products, processes, history, size and location, but also in their central organisation, that resembles a federated system with several distinctive manufacturing networks. As diverse as they may be, every factory has the same goals and challenges - to supply their customers reliably, delivering premium quality and meeting growing economic demands. This means that processes have to be optimised in order to save time, resources, and energy. This is only possible with consistent digitisation and automation. However, there is often little time for this in addition to the day-to-day business, which is why it is imperative to create synergies and to share resources, especially digital solutions between factories. Here, the Factory Digitalization Program comes into play.
Besides an increase in manufacturing productivity and the effectiveness of digital instruments, the main focus is put on the redevelopment of digital tools to enable scalability within a highly diverse manufacturing system. The realisation of these combined objectives requires a specific project organisation, leveraging IT solution development and support.
Project organization: The three main streams
In order to realise its full potential the program is divided into three main streams, addressing the diverse levels of automation and digitalisation in the Siemens manufacturing world. At least one third of the factories have both limited experience with digital tools and very limited resources dedicated exclusively to automation and digitalisation. In the first program step, the team conducted value stream analysis and delivered roadmaps with clear priorities for digitalisation in joint projects between the local production engineering and shopfloor employees, as well as Siemens internal consulting, called Advanta.
Approximately 1 factory per month in Europe, China and the Americas have undergone this process in the first year of the program with a cumulated number of several hundred initiatives being mapped on their individual factory roadmaps. However, the prioritised initiatives are reduced down to approximately 40. They are centrally supported with a start-up budget, since they represent projects that entail scalable solutions. This means that they can be used across different types of manufacturing and potentially even by customers. A central support team, alongside the local project owners, ensures that these projects are conducted according to state-of-the art project management guidelines, supported by the right IT departments and that the people involved are connected to the second program module.
Scalability is at the core of this second program module, named Scaling Technology (ST) Start-up Groups. Within 10 such groups, all clustered around a set of core technologies, FD established a worldwide agile network of more than 200 experts from individual factories. These teams experiment and learn fast when re-architecting and developing existing digital tools for scalable use. The set-up allows to get support by central services and drivers to enable these projects to take up space alongside day-to-day operations and to fund smaller but general purpose solutions, as well as long-term enabling technologies and sustainability initiatives.
These ST-groups, the heartbeat of the FD program, are mostly led by people coming from the more mature plant clusters, such as the one having undergone LDF. As these experts are coming from the field, they have a clear view of production gain, motivated by technically driven curiosity and the constructive will to improve. The scaling of the individual solutions is guaranteed through community building, based on improved communication among like-minded people, healthy competition between plants and plant networks and very close collaboration with internal solution providers, wherever possible.
The circular approach of this enterprise program is evident. Pressing topics are collected in factory acceleration workshops at the plants and handed over to the scaling technologies to extract common and scalable solution requirements. These requirements are getting translated into scalable solutions which are helping the factories to meet their productivity targets and prepare them for future competitiveness.
To support such a federated digitalisation approach, the third module covered by the FD program gains importance. The Solution Framework is not only acting as a glue between the two aforementioned modules, i.e. the more mature and the less mature factories. It also acts as a glue between the IT departments and manufacturing by establishing a common understanding of the topics at hand. The reference architecture is thereby professionalised with a team of solution and enterprise architects. Furthermore, this architecture is connected to reference processes, both of which are then also reflected in a more easy and handy way in the so-called Solution Platform: A repository of use cases linked with respective technology and experts inside the Siemens network which allows for an even more accelerated digitalisation of a factory.
Covering white spots
Addressing state-of-the art digitalisation topics at scale, is not the only purpose followed up by the FD program. It also aims at making Siemens manufacturing future-ready by addressing the most pressing trends related to demography, such as skill shortages or sustainability. In doing so, it creates and drives solutions to cover white spots in existing technology portfolios.
Some of those spots are small, whilst some, are bigger. One of these small spots is connected to the Digital Twin of production, more concretely to how simulation is used day by day in the Siemens factories. In order to build a digital twin and to integrate digital copies of machines into simulation models of entire production lines, a lot of effort is needed. It already starts with the first step: Factories require machine CADs from their suppliers in order to to build a working model. The integration of the supplied CADs into existing models requires high effort.
This is mainly due to the fact that the delivered CAD data needs to be filtered so that it includes only the necessary parameters and can easily be handled. Consequently, when working with simulation tools, it makes sense to develop tools to reduce these efforts systematically and in that way, save a lot of time to build Digital Twins of production based on the delivered CAD data. This was done with the help of a dedicated toolbox, attached to the simulation tools used at the production engineering in Siemens electronic factories.
There are larger spots, though. One of them includes the Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) domain. Planning and scheduling of production orders, information and material management in manufacturing execution or quality control are part of this domain and usually covered by monolithic software systems. In the context of Factory Digitalization this domain is re-thought in a modularised logic, allowing for flexibility, not only in the use but also in the implementation of the software covering it. An even larger spot, the call for a drastic reduction of CO2 emissions, is calling for completely new solutions.
Sustainability: A lighter CO2 backpack for products
One example of such a new solution is the approach Siemens is pioneering to determine its product-related carbon emissions. When the Amberg Siemens factory was thinking about a carbon neutral product, they realised that the steady globalisation of product supply chains has made it increasingly difficult for manufacturing companies to actually determine a product’s CO2 backpack. More than 95% of the carbon emission impact of a product lies in the supply chain, with tremendous potential for optimisation. The factory could almost completely determine their product-related internal carbon emissions by applying Siemens’ own products such as Energy Management and Industrial Edge. However, understanding the emissions a company is trading in by the components it purchases, is getting highly labour-intensive and complicated. This is mainly due to lack of reliable and secure data transfer across the supply chain ecosystem.
So, the experts in the decarbonisation ST-group are developing an ecosystem using cryptographic encryption within a blockchain, where verifiable certificates and proofs can be forwarded to the next company in the delivery chain along with the product’s carbon value. This distributed ledger technology allows to generate and forward a product’s real data, including its specific product carbon footprint. It is worthwhile to mention, that this sharing mechanism just requires very low non notable energy consumption - as it has nothing to do with crypto mining - it is just sharing data with verifiable and cryptographic credentials over an ecosystem which is called Trustworthy Supply Chain Exchange (TSX).
