A big obstacle to digitalizing industry could soon be a thing of the past. The Manufacturing-X initiative makes a new type of data exchange possible between industrial partners – innovative, self-determined, and trust-based.
Manufacturing-X was launched as part of the Industry 4.0 platform, with the aim of promoting digital ecosystems and establishing an international standard for data exchange. It is an industry-wide initiative of the German government with various projects for different industrial sectors.
“The realization that the digitalization of industry is inevitable has become the norm over the past few years,” says Georg Kube, head of Industry Data Ecosystems at SAP SE. “A variety of use cases for different industries and new business models have been developed. They are successful – but only as long as companies work with other companies with which they already have a close partnership.”
“The most well-known of the [Manufacturing-X] projects is certainly Catena-X for the automotive sector,” Kube says. “The common aim of all these projects is to establish a new form of data exchange.”
For example, an automaker that wants to digitally integrate its direct suppliers typically requests all the data about the supplied parts from its partners, and the suppliers usually feel comfortable providing this data because of the trust that has grown over the years between the partners.
But it’s different when data is needed from companies without a direct business relationship. “A typical example is the determination of a vehicle’s CO2 footprint,” Kube says. “Suddenly, information about the CO2 footprint of the smallest plastic parts is needed, which may come from companies in the supply chain with which a company has never had direct contact. It’s not easy to access that data.”
