GENERAL NEWS
Digitalisation is key for Europe
Sina Scheidle, Head of BodyTEC at Mercedes-Benz AG, and former BDI President, Prof. Siegfried Russwurm, discussed the digitalisation of German and European industry with professors at the WGP spring conference at Garmisch- Partenkirchen( Germany), in May.
The WGP( Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Produktionstechnik e. V.) is an association of leading German professors of production science. It represents the interests of research and teaching vis-à-vis politics, business and the public. The WGP brings together 72 professors from 44 university and Fraunhofer institutes and represents 2,000 scientists in production technology.
“ We are in global competition, we must take note of this and work on our competitiveness in production before we fall even further behind,” emphasised Russwurm, acting Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp and the Voith Group. WGP President, Prof. Michael Zäh, added:“ Despite the many achievements already made, there is still great potential for improvement.”
Sina Scheidle reported on her experiences at the BodyTEC centre. The centre has endto-end responsibility for the production of body parts and pressing tools. This includes all process steps from the development of forming tools to production in the pressing plant.
Scheidle also presented the Mercedes- Benz digital production ecosystem, MO360 for short. With the help of digital twins and virtual commissioning, all data from individual production systems is digitally recorded and planned, tested and adapted in virtual space.
“ Thanks to generative AI, it was possible to reduce energy consumption by 20 % in the top coat booths at the Rastatt plant, for example,” said Scheidle. Interested employees can train to become digitalisation experts at the Digital Factory Campus Berlin, she added.
Training, AI and Industry 4.0
Image: WZL Aachen.
Prof. Thomas Bergs.
The training of today’ s and tomorrow’ s specialists and managers was also a major topic in the panel discussion. Siegfried Russwurm emphasised that companies need to work‘ significantly’ on the issue
Image: WGP.
Panel discussion at the WGP Spring Conference. L-R: Prof. Michael Zäh, WGP President; Prof. Siegfried Russwurm, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp and the Voith Group; and Sina Scheidle, Head of BodyTEC, Mercedes-Benz AG.
of internships for students, for example, to show“ the attractive professional reality in engineering professions and enable a sense of achievement for concrete projects.”
To meet the demand for
‘ data workers’, Mercedes- Benz has launched an internal in-service training programme called D. SHIFT.
“ It qualifies employees for digitalisation and AI tasks and shapes them into‘ digital superheroes’, as they are known internally,” confirmed Scheidle. Driving digitalisation forward and finding enough well-trained people to do so is one of the greatest challenges facing German and European industry in the face of global competition, warned Russwurm.
Russwurm countered the question of whether AI has been sufficiently incorporated into university curricula with the statement that there is no such thing as‘ enough’.
“ It is much more important to show young people that AI is not just in ChatGPT and mobile phones. We need to familiarise them with AI applications in production, but then also‘ let the digital natives do it’ in project work, in industry and at university institutes,” he said.
The rapid advance of Industry 4.0 cooperation between research and practice must also be intensified, he added. Universities should not only focus their funding on state support, but also specifically seek private sector investors. According to the former BDI President, industry must also play its part and contribute funding.
The Manufacturing-X initiative
Industry 4.0 and digitalisation is one of the most important research topics at the 44 WGP institutes. The WGP professors therefore wish to examine the extent to which the further development of Industry 4.0 should be taken up as part of the Manufacturing-X initiative i. e. the development of cooperating, decentralised data ecosystems along complete process and supply chains.
“ With regard to the further development of production research, we not only need to understand the approaches in Manufacturing-X but also need to help shape them as the WGP,” emphasised Prof. Thomas Bergs, spokesperson for the working group. This also includes making the potential from these initiatives available to medium-sized manufacturing companies and, for example, developing traceability as a business model.
Issues that are relevant for German and European industry and standards which are working today will be examined using specific use cases, such as the end-toend quality control of safety-critical engine turbine discs as part of the Aerospace-X project.
“ At the Autumn conference in November, we will then take a close look at other project initiatives, such as Factory-X, and identify relevant fields of action for the WGP,” concluded Bergs.
The WGP has just published a position paper on resilience in production. n
https:// wgp. de / en /
8 | ismr. net | ISMR July / August 2025