Industrial producers are contending with a trifecta of timely challenges. The need to adapt and respond to changing market conditions and a trend towards more customized products create growing manufacturing complexity, while skilled workers to manage and master that complexity continue to be in very short supply. The result is mounting pressure on global producers to modernize operations quickly and unlock the benefits of a more flexible baseline for operations, real-time value chain insights, and a data-centric organization.
For manufacturers to best navigate these challenges, existing production methods must be expanded. Organizations need to be able to operate cost-effectively, sustainably, and as resiliently as possible.
In the future, companies must be able to flexibly adapt formerly predictable and repeatable processes - powered by automation - to unforeseeable events. This requires the convergence of operational technology (OT) with capabilities from the IT and software worlds. VMware’s virtualization capabilities, for example, support a software-based approach to enhanced production technologies by facilitating more flexible production. Customers would realize tangible benefits such as the ability to automatically import new functionalities into automation software; deploying, multiplying and managing applications remotely; or scaling functionalities without the need to install new hardware.
At VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, VMware and Siemens will discuss how to make a software-based approach to production technologies a reality. During a roundtable session, “A New Era for Manufacturing: Keep the World Moving, No Matter What,” leaders from VMware and Siemens will explore how virtual Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) technologies and IT technologies can bring about the benefits for a flexible production of the future, and how the convergence of the OT and IT worlds will solve some of the great challenges of industrial production today and tomorrow.