CEOInterviews.AISiemens | Live from Hannover Messe 2026

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Christine9:57

Bom dia from Hanover, dear community. Great you're joining us again. Welcome to Hanover Messe day three in hall 27, the living room of innovation and technology streaming to you from the Siemens fair booth. We're having a great time with lots of customers joining us. It's 9:15 and there are already many of them talking to our experts. Technology to technology to touch. Max, how are you doing this morning?

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Max10:29

I'm doing pretty good, thank you. It's already the middle of the week and as you can see, we are here where we left off at SPS. We went off on the motorbike and we're back on it again, loving it. Powerful rides at Hanover, that's for sure. It's an exciting time and our customers have challenging times. We do have the solutions to take care of them. We have lots of customers here on stage today talking about how we brought solutions to them. There is Syngenta, Coca-Cola, Pringles. We had a crunch test this morning. We will have Perum, Bühler, GEA Group, Amazon Robotics, Alfa Laval, and Palo Alto Systems. But also many partners: TeamViewer, Microsoft, CAS MT, Nvidia, AWS, Accenture, Grey Logix, FFT, Snowflake, Anzeta, and many more. We have a main focus on consumer packaged goods today with Coca-Cola and Pringles, but also you'll be very active on stage today, Max, in regards of pharmaceutical topics. Yes, that's right. I have 10 sessions and the big farmer session starting around 4:00 with Maria Graham. Johnson & Johnson is part of them as well.

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Christine12:41

They are, yes. I mean, if you have not decided yet whether you want to come to Hanover or not, click the button, get your free ticket, and come here. Hall 27, close to the ICE train station. Take a look at what we are showing because it's breathtaking. And breathtaking is when you stroll around at our booth. I'm walking over to Izzy, our running reporter, who is covering the first session today. There is so much to explore here. Industrial controls is one of the first topics. I'm just showing you a little glimpse of the activity at 9:20 at Siemens fair booth. And with this, enjoy the day, stay with us, and handing it over to Izzy.

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Izzy13:39

Thank you, Christine. So, we're kicking off and I'm joined by Eric Frohlich, product owner of the Simatic ET 200SP E-starter. Eric, I've heard that you're presenting the brand new innovation for our ET 200SP E-starter. Can you tell us what it's all about?

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Eric Frohlich14:02

Yeah, right. Thank you, Izzy. What we are presenting right now is our new standard module, which adds some cool new features to our ET 200SP E-starter. Just by plugging it in like this, we add new features. For example, we have a yellow part indicating safety functionality to safely shut down motors in emergency situations. The device makes sure the motor comes to a stop. We also certify the e-starter for ATEX and IECEx for explosive areas. Additionally, we add advanced condition monitoring functions for predictive maintenance. It reads power values and starting times to give advance information on maintenance needs. This is the first e-starter with these features integrated into the ET 200SP system, with electronic short-circuit protection and a smart start function that reduces torque peaks.

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Izzy17:17

Great. And lastly, it's covering a broad range of applications then, you'd say?

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Eric Frohlich17:24

Yeah, that's correct. It's the only device in the whole market with this functionality integrated into the automation system. It protects mechanical and electrical parts of the application. And now with the highlight of safety applications.

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Izzy18:16

Well, that's fascinating and it sounds like a really exclusive product that we provide here with Siemens. So, thank you Eric. I'm going to pass it back to Christine on the main stage and Melissa up in the gallery studio.

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Christine18:30

Welcome to day three. Indeed, for us it's Hannover Messe time, day three at the main stage here in hall 27. Great you're joining us again. There are more than 20 customers here talking about the solutions we provided. Lots of partners sharing their expertise. Unlocking grid transparency at distribution level doesn't have to be rocket science if you have the right partners. On stage there will be our first expert of the day, a global technical consultant for IoT at Siemens with the company since 12 years, Tony Weinmann.

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Tony Weinmann21:15

Good morning everybody and welcome to day three of the North American 2026. Exactly two years ago we introduced electrification excellent integrated IT suite for electrification and automation. Now we are ready to take this topic to the next level by unlocking grid transparency at distribution level. We show an all-in-one solution for the digitalization of transformer substations with plug-and-play integration of medium voltage switchgear. Global warming demands more resilience, efficiency, and sustainability, driving massive electrification. Did you know the grids will double from 2023 to 2033? That means building in 10 years what took us 100 years. Digitalization is the answer. We can accelerate every step with pre-configured IoT-ready components, seamless integration, reduced costs, and simplified implementation. We support customers with digitalization campaigns, focusing today on distribution stations. We start from data collection to data transmission and IoT software. We ensure end-to-end cybersecurity, aligned with NIS 2. Let's build the architecture level by level: field level with sensors, station level with devices, edge level connecting OT and IT, cloud level with electrification X. We are happy to announce the brand new IoT-ready switchgear CENA, short for switchgear for intelligent network automation. It provides full transparency of medium voltage, transformer, and low voltage data. It has a digital, future-proof design and is insulated with clean air instead of SF6. With electrification X, you can increase grid capacity by up to 30%, prevent overloads, optimize investment planning, and more. For example, customer IBC from Switzerland is using it for 200 transformer substations. Thanks for your time. Enjoy the fair.

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Christine32:53

Thank you very much. Perfect way to get us going here on day three. Welcome to our booth here in hall 27. This is our new home for the first time in many years. We are showcasing what we can do in electrification, automation, and digitalization, and now with industrial AI. Get yourselves comfortable and enjoy the show. We're now ready for the first talk of the day about energy transparency and energy management through a real use case developed in 2025 in Brazil. Please give a warm welcome to Ricardo, Vitor, Isabella, Dominic, and Sebastian.

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Max34:54

Hey, hi. Take a seat. Thanks. Hello. Good morning. Wow, it's packed. I hope you're all doing well. Introductions: Isabella and Vitor are responsible for the project in Brazil for Siemens. Dominic and Sebastian are from Siemens taking care of the solution and product. We have special participation from Ricardo, representing Syngenta, our client in this project. Let's see where this talk takes us. Ricardo, I'd like to start at the beginning with you. Can you tell us a bit about Syngenta and what motivated this project?

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Ricardo35:52

Okay, perfect. Thank you, Max. Syngenta is one of the leading agritech companies in the world, present in 92 countries. In Brazil, we are facing a big expansion in our plant in Paulínia. Since the beginning, we had a challenge to manage energy in our site and get better digital data.

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Max36:35

If we look at this, what were the specific needs and challenges when expanding the site?

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Ricardo36:42

Paulínia is the largest formulation and filling pack of agrochemicals in the world for us, but we hadn't any kind of digital electrical data. The maintenance team had no possibility to get simple data like consumption. We started with these pain points to give a better solution with Siemens. We suggested a solution to monitor all loads including low voltage switchboard and motor control center, providing complete visibility of energy consumption and asset data.

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Max37:52

So, Vitor, one day Ricardo approached you with these requirements. What did you do? What was the approach?

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Vitor38:05

It's a very cool collaborative way since day one. First, we listened to all Syngenta needs and knew we couldn't work alone. We brought in our partner Real Tech and developed a complete solution of energy management. This three-way partnership was totally fundamental to the project success.

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Max38:42

Let's dive now deeper into the technical aspects. That's where Isabella comes in. What did Siemens propose to meet these requirements?

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Isabella38:53

The technical part was very interesting. When Syngenta planned the expansion, energy monitoring wasn't in scope. But when Ricardo brought the need to give the maintenance team more data, we thought we could give transparency and power monitoring. We added new circuit breakers with measurement and communication capabilities, and PAC devices. We expanded the expansion project. With the measuring devices, we needed to give transparency, so we implemented a Siemens power management solution.

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Max40:12

Let's look more into the energy management solution. Sebastian, I'd like to start with you, then Dominic you can come in. How does it work?

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Sebastian40:22

We combine the real and digital world. The portfolio is built to start small and let customers grow. This project is a textbook example. We presented the products and chose together with the partner to start with Power Center 3000 and then grow with Power Manager.

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Max41:00

Speaking of Power Center 3000. Maybe I just add a couple of words to this product. What is it? I brought one with me. Lots of power inside. It is a pre-installed energy monitoring software on an IPC, very robust. It brings secure communication from the field to any management system, and comes with an integrated web interface for dedicated user groups like the maintenance team.

Okay. Ricardo, all four of these guests came up with this amazing solution. What did you think? Did it address all of your concerns?

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Ricardo42:41

Yes, very impressive results. We could address all our pain points. The solution gave our maintenance team the autonomy they wanted. It's the first digital solution for electrical data collection for us in Paulínia and in Latin America. We intend to replicate this for other sites and make it a global standard for Syngenta.

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Max44:02

Now, let's look into the future. From a Siemens perspective, Isabella, Sebastian, then Dominic. Isabella, would you like to go first? What's next?

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Isabella44:17

This project was the first for Syngenta in Latin America. We want to use it as an example for all other plants. The first step is to get more devices into the power center and replicate to other plants. In the future, we could include energy quality and more insights.

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Max44:57

Yeah, that's where Power Manager comes in. With Power Center 3000, the foundation is in place. Now we learn what Syngenta needs, and then with Power Manager's enhanced functionalities like multi-site management, advanced reporting, power quality advisor, this allows scaling and control room operation.

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Sebastian46:03

I think the next steps are naturally given because of the great collaboration between Siemens, our partner Biotic, and the customer. The architecture is built to go these journeys: starting fast, learning, growing, and expanding.

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Max46:56

Sounds promising. We wish you all the best. Isabella, can you tell our audience where they need to go to find out more?

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Isabella47:06

Yes, if you want to know more about Power Center and Power Manager, go to our booth 173 here at Hannover Fair, on my left side of the stage.

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Max47:26

Good. Partner country Brazil also represented everywhere. Ricardo, I'd like to end with you. Would you like to summarize the partnership and collaboration that made this project successful?

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Ricardo47:46

It's a very genuine collaboration project. Siemens and the partners listened to everything we wanted to implement and put that into this solution. This is exactly what Syngenta expected from our partners. It's very impressive.

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Max48:16

That is great to hear. Another perfect example of how we're working together with our customers and partners. Thank you so much for sharing. Can we have a big round of applause? And now, Ricardo, I have a little something. This is from Natura. Take a look inside. For our Siemens colleagues, we also have something from Natura. Thank you very much. Take a look around and enjoy the rest of the fair.

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Christine49:12

So, from energy management, we're now going to take a step to cybersecurity in the consumer packaged goods industry. Cybersecurity is no longer just a technical afterthought. In 2026, it's a fundamental pillar of industrial resilience. Manufacturing is now the number one target for cyber attacks. This talk will look at different approaches for cybersecurity in CPG, focusing on the regulatory landscape like NIS 2, machine regulation, and CRA. Please give a warm welcome to Malin Funk Nøring, Dominik Bielau, and Stefan Morawietz.

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Max50:19

Hi, how are you? Good, thank you. Malin, you are a senior compliance specialist at Alfa Laval. Dominik is from Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, OT cybersecurity operations lead. Stefan from Siemens is director of industrial cybersecurity. Malin, I'd like to start with you. There are all these upcoming rules and regulations. What's the impact on your business unit at Alfa Laval and how are you navigating?

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Malin Funk Nøring51:16

Yes, we are covered by the machine regulation and the Cyber Resilience Act. We are monitoring the evolving legal landscape and standardization to work proactively. We ensure our measures align with legislation, and our customers' security is our foremost concern. Complying also supports NIS2 requirements.

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Max52:03

Speaking of NIS2, Dominik, how are you approaching it at CCEP and how are you addressing your suppliers?

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Dominik Bielau52:16

NIS2 was a challenge because we are affected in several countries with different local adoptions. We started a project team with IT, OT, and legal to align on a global approach, using our German model as a blueprint. We decided on one framework for all CCEP. OT cybersecurity is a critical enabler for business resilience. Regarding vendors, we are in close contact with OEMs to align on the Cyber Resilience Act.

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Max54:12

Stefan, taking the wider perspective, how are our customers dealing with NIS2 currently?

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Stefan Morawietz54:22

NIS2 is being implemented in most European countries. Some customers haven't started their cybersecurity journey yet. Many are discussing if they fall under the regulations. Others are taking it seriously, starting with gaining transparency on assets and cybersecurity implementation. There is a lack of skilled resources, so Siemens helps gain transparency, create asset inventories, and discuss risks, vulnerabilities, obsolescence management, patches, retrofits, and migrations. You can't protect what you can't see.

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Max56:14

Staying with you, Stefan. So, we've spoken about NIS2. If we look into the next two or three years, what else is going to be important?

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Stefan Morawietz56:23

I expect companies will continue their cybersecurity journey. With the Cyber Resilience Act, machine builders will start including cybersecurity in their offerings within 1-2 years. It will be interesting to observe how they implement it. This poses a challenge for end customers to orchestrate measures from different OEMs into a manageable framework. Siemens is well-positioned to support them. Also, geopolitical tensions may lead other regulators to revisit their regulations.

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Max57:39

And as you say, cybersecurity is ready when customers get our products. Malin, machinery regulation – you referenced it at the beginning. How do the cybersecurity regulations in that differ from those in the CRA?

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Malin Funk Nøring58:21

The timing differs: machinery regulation becomes mandatory in January 2027, before CRA. In scope, CRA covers all products with digital elements, while machinery regulation focuses on machinery and whether a cyber threat can compromise safety. Machine manufacturers must recognize that vulnerabilities could undermine safety measures. Also, we must consider cybersecurity intended use. Ensure machinery is compliant with new requirements.

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Max59:49

Dominik, when you speak with your OEMs about the Cyber Resilience Act, what are they saying?

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Dominik Bielau59:57

The Cyber Resilience Act is a different challenge. We at CCP are not directly affected as we don't build machines, but our OEMs are. We have one standard for OEMs requiring compliance. Now we are reviewing it to include CRA requirements. We are in close contact with major OEMs to align on roadmaps. We want to maintain one CCP machinery standard while ensuring all OEMs follow it, so we don't end up with 15 different approaches. OEMs are aware and working on it. A machine delivered in 2 years will have much better OT cybersecurity maturity.

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Max1:01:45

We have just over a minute left. I can ask you all very briefly for a recommendation. Customers looking to kick off their compliance roadmaps. Dominik, would you like to go first?

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Dominik Bielau1:02:00

First, get transparency on which regulations apply. Then define ownership responsibilities and start a project team to deep-dive all regulations to create one central framework to be compliant with all.

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Max1:02:41

Malin, would you agree?

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Malin Funk Nøring1:02:43

Yes, I agree. Emphasis that these requirements enforce a change in working, processes, and culture. Seek external expertise and train personnel.

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Max1:03:00

Finally, Stefan, what's your recommendation?

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Stefan Morawietz1:03:04

Just don't wait. Start the journey.

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Host1:03:10

All the challenges along the way, but please do not wait and hesitate. The time to act is now, yesterday maybe. Get going now. Stefan, where can people go on our booth?

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Stefan Morawietz1:03:27

We have several places showing cybersecurity. For CPG customers, there is the CPG showcase with managed IT/OT and remote industrial operations. Other spots across the Siemens booth also cover cybersecurity.

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Host1:03:44

Amazing. Time to wrap up. A big round of applause for Marlin, Dominic, and Stefan. Thank you for joining me. Marlin and Dominic, we have gifts from Natura, our cosmetics company from Brazil that uses our digital twin to optimize essential oil extraction. Enjoy. Thank you. Bye.

Time for our next talk. I'd like to hand over to our moderator, the chief of staff to the CEO and CMO at Siemens Digital Industry Software, Noah Cole.

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Noah Cole1:04:43

Good morning and welcome to Hannover 2026. We're talking about industrial AI. AI is everywhere, but no company can do this alone. How do we scale AI, reshape industry, and transform real-world operations? I'd like to welcome Tony Hemmelgarn, CEO of Siemens Digital Industries Software, and Oliver, CEO of TeamViewer.

Tony, you've spent a big part of your career in Europe. People say Europe is behind in consumer AI but has an advantage in industrial AI. What gives Europe that advantage?

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Tony Hemmelgarn1:06:08

I don't see it as geographical. It's about what companies want to do. The difference between general AI and industrial AI is that industrial AI must be deterministic — same data, same output every time. That's happened more here because of Siemens and our German base, driving that differentiation.

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Noah Cole1:07:17

You've talked a lot about data. Oliver, how does TeamViewer fit into the industrial AI landscape?

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Oliver1:07:30

As Tony said, it's deterministic. Data is very distributed, with legacy systems, brownfield, all kinds of equipment. TeamViewer provides a platform to connect IT and OT devices and manage that data.

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Noah Cole1:08:11

Many companies start AI pilots but they don't always succeed. Tony, where are people getting stuck?

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Tony Hemmelgarn1:08:29

Start with data. If your data isn't well structured and reliable, be careful. Most customers go to Teamcenter for that structured data. We created Teamcenter X for smaller companies to organize data. Then use digital threads — how to go from point A to point B — and now apply agentic AI to those solutions.

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Noah Cole1:10:31

Oliver, how do you connect legacy systems and frontline workers?

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Oliver1:10:52

People fail because they lack context. You need to be multimodal: understand back office, engineering data, machines, and workers. Bring it to one platform, like Teamcenter, and then get it to the frontline. End-to-end digital workflows with AI can make you proactive and use agents.

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Noah Cole1:12:11

What do you think agentic AI will look like for customers?

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Tony Hemmelgarn1:12:30

We're already doing it. With Rolls-Royce, we set up a digital representation of the factory. When an issue occurs, Agentic runs through the change process, looks at maintenance material, makes a recommendation, and can drive the change through Teamcenter. With TeamViewer, we augment the worker with agentic and AR/VR to address workforce shortages.

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Oliver1:14:26

Skill shortage is a real pain point globally. There's opportunity now because end customers are open to connectivity, understanding the value of AI. Agents can do more remotely, with fluid handover to people, delivering significant benefits.

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Noah Cole1:15:42

How do we make that safe for frontline workers interacting with agents?

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Oliver1:15:56

Data governance and trusted partnerships are key. You need full context, constant observation and analysis, and work with partners who have other parts of the data. It's an ecosystem play. Optimizing a single process with small agents is difficult; you need to share data and build digital threads together.

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Tony Hemmelgarn1:17:06

Building on that, we have full traceability through Teamcenter so you know data sources are reliable, not from obsolete SharePoint. That's crucial.

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Noah Cole1:17:36

AI is accelerating IT/OT convergence. Tony, what do you see? Oliver, how does TeamViewer help?

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Tony Hemmelgarn1:18:04

Look at the Pepsi example: IT design and layout of the factory combined with operational view – IT/OT convergence. We can simulate and even drive the factory with executable digital twins loaded on edge devices.

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Oliver1:18:51

TeamViewer already connects IT and OT. With AI, you get proactiveness: constantly observe devices, analyze behavior, fix issues before they arise. That digital employee experience concept now extends to OT.

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Noah Cole1:20:10

Tony, talk about the partnership and what TeamViewer brings to Siemens.

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Tony Hemmelgarn1:20:25

We didn't buy an AR/VR company; we partnered with TeamViewer because they have pragmatic use cases. Our partnership works because we're both focused on real-world solutions.

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Oliver1:21:08

Pragmatic is key. Industrial customers have hands-on problems: warehouse picking with high attrition, or repair maintenance with semi-trained experts. We provide workflows that work on any device in their environment.

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Noah Cole1:22:00

Imagine five years from now at Hanover 2031. What will look different? 30 seconds each.

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Tony Hemmelgarn1:22:17

In software, guessing beyond 3 years is kidding yourself. But it will be even more aggressive. The same principles apply: data, use cases, digital threads. You'll see that running through all our products and partnership with TeamViewer.

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Oliver1:22:48

You'll see tighter partnerships. From a customer perspective, it's still too heterogeneous. More partnering and consistent end-to-end processes will help large customers work with it day in and day out.

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Noah Cole1:23:15

Great. Thank you both. The future of AI will be shaped by industry leaders like you. We have gifts from Natura for Oliver and Tony. Round of applause. And you brought your own fan club.

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Moderator1:23:53

Welcome once again. Christine has a special jumper on. What's going on?

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Christine1:23:59

Woohoo! It's a bit of an indication of what's next.

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Moderator1:24:05

They're talking about crisps in our next session. No party without crisps. Hello to our LinkedIn live community. We're in the living room of innovation at Hannover Messe. Next session is about Pringles - how data, AI, and digital twins turned a traditional operation into an adaptive factory.

Please welcome the four crunch experts: Daniel Klein, Ronnie Matthys, Jan Leenen, and Cedric Neike.

Great having you here. Let's sit on the sofa of wisdom. How are you doing?

Great. Looks like a football club, but this is the right fan crowd. Quick who's who: Daniel Klein, VP Consulting at Siemens and intense crisp tester. Ronnie Matthys, Plant Director at Pringles. Jan Leenen, Global Digitalization Lead at Pringles. And Cedric von? Actually, member of the management board and CEO Digital Industries. Cedric, you work with many CPG companies. What global trends do you see?

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Cedrik Neike1:27:42

I really like food – chocolate, crisps. I love talking about microchips and potato chips. CPG is a huge industry, about 2.5-3 trillion dollars, not very consolidated. Technology can improve quality, taste, sustainability, and solve supply chain issues. We need to make sure production is sustainable. Pringles is a visionary in that.

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Ronnie Matthys1:29:21

Fair. At home you adjust dough off, at scale we produce 24/7. Small variations impact thousands of products. Historically we were reactive, using intuition. With Siemens, we build a digital twin to see dough behavior in real time and guide the process before it happens – real transformation.

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Moderator1:30:56

What did it look like before?

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Ronnie Matthys1:31:00

Challenging. High demand not enough capacity, processes unstable, high waste. Natural products change daily, making it impossible to have a stable process. People with different knowledge caused performance variation. Not scalable or future-proof. In 2023, partnership with Siemens changed everything.

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Moderator1:32:08

Daniel, how did you approach optimizing Pringles?

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Daniel Klein1:32:18

We sat together and said, 'We have technology, but we need to understand your processes.' We did an assessment of the lighthouse factory, came up with 14 initiatives. Started with three: digital twin, AI-based process control, energy management, and predictive maintenance. We used test criteria – if after 3 months no positive outcome, stop. Ronnie said, 'I accept your death criteria.' That marked the partnership.

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Moderator1:34:42

Jan, how do you scale what you built in Kutno globally?

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Jan Leenen1:35:00

In 2024 we committed to one line in Kutno, proved it out by 2025. Now scaling to US and Belgium Pringles factories. Also looking at other food platforms like cereal. We're connecting manufacturing with R&D and engineering to build digital threads. That allows R&D to qualify suppliers, introduce new ingredients, and optimize formulation. We aim for an infinite learning cycle using data, AI, and digital twins.

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Moderator1:37:41

Cedric, when everything is connected, what becomes possible beyond these use cases?

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Cedrik Neike1:37:50

Infinite learning and experimentation. You can develop super recipes quickly and test globally. For example, jalapeño Pringles dipped in chocolate – I'm not sure if true, but it shows the idea. Launch a new product in a day. Also sustainability: produce a chip with 7% less energy – billions of chips, huge savings. Or adapt to supply chain changes. This is about accelerating possibilities. Most companies have more pilots than Lufthansa. What you need is continuous thinking along digital threads.

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Daniel Klein1:40:07

Pringles is a nice example of a journey toward industrial metaverse. We started with a dough digital twin to tackle variation. That created a data pool that R&D used. Procurement used it for negotiating contracts. Then we added plant simulation to avoid bottlenecks. It's like LEGO blocks – each solution builds the foundation for the industrial metaverse.

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Moderator1:42:12

Jan, how do you scale across global operations with complexity?

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Jan Leenen1:42:49

We reflect on what we try to do with digitalization and bring it back to business needs. Food and beverage must create value for consumers, retailers, and shareholders. Driving innovation gives us productivity and new product news. Critical is bringing people along – from shop floor to R&D. Create a culture where data is first, so people look at data before changing machines. That's how the cycle delivers value.

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Moderator1:44:50

Three minutes left. Quick summary. Ronnie, what did you expect and how was it realized?

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Ronnie Matthys1:45:05

It was a big risk moving into unknown territory with two companies. I told my team, 'If we don't dream big, nothing changes.' When you dare to dream big, transformation starts. Results: people spend less time firefighting, take data-driven decisions, have more confidence. That's real transformation – people using and trusting technology.

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Moderator1:45:59

Cedric, what was your first thought when you heard about going with Pringles?

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Cedrik Neike1:46:05

Great taste does not need to produce big waste – waste of data, time, energy. If we work together, we produce faster, better, more sustainably. It's a pleasure to have high-tech minds in an industry that needs support. Great taste does not produce big waste.

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Moderator1:46:31

Daniel, how often do you call each other?

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Daniel Klein1:46:42

Sometimes I speak more to them than to my wife. We have a regular call every Friday and meet several times a week.

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Moderator1:47:00

Thank you all. There's a big showcase at our booth for CPG digital enterprise. Thank you for trust and the teams behind you. Big round of applause for the four musketeers. We conclude this session. Enjoy the fair. And wherever you go, think of that customer success story with every flavor.

We'll go for a small commercial break now.

Now time to be back on stage. How are you doing? Having a good time? We have partners like Microsoft joining our next session. Two years ago chatbots wrote poetry, now robots that see, understand, and act. The next token is a movement. But there's a difference between a demo and a robot you trust on your factory floor.

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Christine1:50:42

mean, you can write something... I'm joined by three experts: Karl-Heinz Albin Abu-Shaaban, Christoph Berlin, Dr. Kahlmanns, and Prof. Dr. Alin Albu-Schäffer. Let's dive into physical AI. What does it look like in practice? Who wants to start?

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Christoph Berlin1:51:18

Hello, wouldn't you.

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Carl1:53:02

Physical AI is at an inflection point coming out of labs. The question is will it scale. I've seen this at Mercedes, Amazon, Google. For example, we developed a vision-language-action model that equips a robot to pick and package flexible material. That's a tangible example.

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Christine1:55:04

One from you?

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Alin Albu-Schäffer1:55:07

We started with humanoids like Justin, 20 years old. Now we enable non-experts to interact with robots via natural language, for space stations or health care wheelchairs. Foundation models for actions are at a similar point as cobots 10-15 years ago.

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Christoph Berlin1:57:07

At Microsoft, we see physical AI everywhere, especially in data centers. It's about human-machine interaction and autonomy.

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Christine1:57:49

There's an iceberg metaphor: impressive demos but enormous challenges. What are the hardest problems for scalable industrial deployment?

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Carl1:58:12

Top three challenges: data (no internet of motion, expensive teleoperation), evaluation of vision-language-action models, and integration into the whole factory pipeline.

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Christine2:00:25

Alin, from aerospace, what challenges do you see?

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Alin Albu-Schäffer2:00:27

Hardware-software integration is critical and underestimated. Humanoids have many actuators, manipulation requires dexterity. We need to connect knowledge with expensive data.

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Christoph Berlin2:03:17

Another challenge is managing armies of robots - scheduling, workflow integration. It's a heterogeneous space.

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Christine2:04:44

How do we balance speed of innovation with safety on factory floors?

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Carl2:05:01

Safety is foundational. We use a sandbox approach with cognition layer (probabilistic) and safety layer (deterministic guardrails). Digital twins enable fast virtual testing.

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Christoph Berlin2:07:04

We add compliance AI, agents supervising agents to ensure models don't break guardrails.

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Christine2:07:53

Data is called the new oil, but is it a bottleneck?

C

Christoph Berlin2:08:13

Data is not scarce; it's about making it meaningful and contextualized. No data, no AI.

C

Christine2:09:32

Where do you see success in 5 years?

A

Alin Albu-Schäffer2:10:02

We need to go from demos to certified systems. Certification takes years, e.g., cobots 5-6 years, medical 9 years. We may be too conservative. In 5 years, robots in industrial settings; 10 years for home.

C

Christine2:12:09

Carl, anything to add?

C

Carl2:12:12

Success will be about ecosystem integration, like mobile industry. A mid-size manufacturer will use digital twin, select and commission robots virtually, then deploy seamlessly.

C

Christoph Berlin2:13:23

We need to bring common sense into AI. It's a hard problem requiring collaboration.

C

Christine2:14:07

Thank you. Now I hand over to Max.

M

Max2:15:34

Up next, we have a panel on Siemens Industrial Automation Data Center accelerated by NVIDIA and secured by Palo Alto. Please welcome Aric, Daminda, and Alexander.

A

Alexander2:17:53

The foundation is the industrial automation data center, an on-premise pre-configured box ready for AI, bringing together virtualization, storage, backup, and cybersecurity.

A

Aric2:19:24

Our DPU (BlueField card) provides offloading, acceleration, and isolation for cybersecurity, gathering data from edge devices.

D

Daminda2:21:16

We integrated Prisma S on the DPU, offloading cybersecurity to avoid latency, enabling encryption and host-based isolation in OT environments.

A

Alexander2:24:06

Real examples: AI manufacturing assistant at Bayer saved time in drug production; cybersecurity granular control of S7 protocol; digital twin for simulation and validation.

A

Aric2:26:20

The concept is to bring AI to the edge on-premise, gather data from OT and IT for a digital twin that enables real-time simulation and testing.

A

Alexander2:28:01

This is a practical, secure, high-performing solution changing how industry operates. Visit our booth.

M

Max2:28:48

Thank you, gentlemen. Round of applause. And I hand over to Malisha.

M

Malin Funk Nøring2:29:39

Welcome. We're talking about business impact of AI through partnerships. Join me with Dion Smith and Sandeep Gupta.

D

Dion Smith2:32:00

Customers want more with less and faster. Challenges: AI pilots not scaling, 95% of factories not connected. IT-OT convergence is happening fast.

S

Sandeep Gupta2:33:08

We're at a massive shift with agentic workforce. Frontier companies focus on data readiness, security guardrails, and leadership learning by doing. AI is like tasting sugar.

D

Dion Smith2:36:21

AI raises expectations; partners need skills and vertical expertise. No one wins alone; ecosystem is key.

S

Sandeep Gupta2:38:16

Partnerships like Siemens-Microsoft combine industry lifecycle with cloud AI and cybersecurity to solve unplanned downtime, supply chain issues.

M

Malin Funk Nøring2:40:30

Thank you both. That's it for this session.

H

Host2:40:32

Just looking at the numbers from research, companies say industrial AI is the fastest adopting AI space. By 2030, industrial AI is expected to be over 100 billion dollars. Statistics make things real, but I think you want something more concrete. Can you tell us how Siemens and Microsoft are building on industrial AI together?

S

Siemens Representative2:41:05

Let's take concrete examples. We have hundreds of millions of Teams users. With Teamcenter X and Teams Copilot integration, all roles from design to service have Copilot to use Teamcenter more effectively. Last 12 months we released that. This week we released Siemens Eigen agent in TIA developer platform. Now machine PLC developers can generate code from design to test validation. We're also co-building industrial-focused GenAI models because manufacturing modalities differ. We also focus on go-to-market co-sell. It's co-innovation, co-build, and going to market together.

H

Host2:42:48

You talk about speed. We could sit here for another hour, but maybe we can talk about what others are doing differently. Can you bring it to life with a real customer story?

S

Siemens Representative2:43:08

First, I want to amplify: 180 years of industrial experience combined with 51 years of technology experience. Powerful, proven, global expertise. We have a case study with SSAB Sweden, a steel manufacturer. It's an example of our digital thread story, identifying outcomes and delivering true business industrial outcomes at scale.

H

Host2:43:53

Wow. Are you excited about this partnership?

S

Siemens Representative2:43:56

I say we are just starting. I had my breakfast at Siemens and I'll finish my day at Siemens. I'm really excited. Thank you.

H

Host2:44:04

Really. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. You will get a present from our partner Brazil. And that's next up: accelerating Coca-Cola's factory of the future program. I'm handing over to Max and Todd. I hope you're enjoying everything. It's spectacular. Let me hand over to Todd.

T

Todd Weatherby2:45:17

Hello. Welcome. Here with Coca-Cola, Accenture, and Siemens. We'll talk about Coca-Cola's factory of the future initiative. First, introductions. Belen, could you describe your role?

B

Belen2:46:12

Good morning. I'm the director of digital and operational technology in customer service and supply chain for CCP, a Coca-Cola bottler. My role is to define the digital strategy for the factory of the future journey.

T

Todd Weatherby2:46:49

Very good. Thanks, Belen. And Sherry?

S

Sherry2:46:51

Hi everyone. I'm from Accenture, part of the supply chain and engineering team. I've worked in digital manufacturing for 25-30 years, seeing how new technologies enable the future for companies like Coca-Cola.

T

Todd Weatherby2:47:26

Thank you. I'm Todd Weatherby from Siemens Advanta. We're excited about the partnership with Accenture and working with Coca-Cola system-wide. Sherry, could you describe what factory of the future means at Coca-Cola?

S

Sherry2:48:10

This work started about a year ago. Coca-Cola is a system with over 200 bottlers and 900 facilities. We interviewed senior supply chain people, brought thought leadership, worked with Siemens to understand trends. The consumer is more demanding, requiring agility. We built a navigator to help bottlers identify future needs, capabilities, use cases, and architecture. Edge AI and digital twins are critical. We did this across Siemens and Accenture.

T

Todd Weatherby2:52:00

That's a great description. Over 200 bottlers and 900 sites. How do you think of it, Belen, from a bottler perspective?

B

Belen2:52:23

CCP has 31 markets. Our route to market differs. We need to be prepared for changing customers. This partnership gives us a North Star. Every use case and tool is connected to real value. Our strategy focuses on customers first, then efficiency, then people. We need to onboard our people and change processes.

T

Todd Weatherby2:54:35

People, process, technology driven by customer signal. How do you think about applying digital twins to process optimization?

B

Belen2:55:07

Our approach is operations-focused. First challenge: gathering real-time data for a replica. Then we focus on three pillars: yield (reduce waste), operational efficiency (better machine use), and sustainability (resource care). These guide us.

T

Todd Weatherby2:56:58

Is there one farther ahead than the others?

B

Belen2:57:01

Yield is the first we're focused on now.

T

Todd Weatherby2:57:07

Very good. And sweet spots for driving business value with digital twins?

S

Sherry2:57:19

Yield is important. We also hear about energy. We focused on architecture layers for early value and scalability. With about 10 greenfield and 20 brownfield facilities being designed, the big opportunity is in operations. Optimizing operations via simulation reduces capex by improving efficiency, energy, water from existing facilities.

T

Todd Weatherby2:58:51

So getting more capacity without capex. But you also said the operations side has huge opportunity. Is that how you think?

B

Belen2:59:17

Yes, completely. The key is brownfield. We have the North Star; now we define the journey, starting with capturing data from older machines not prepared for AI or connectivity. That also represents a risk.

T

Todd Weatherby3:00:12

Got it. You can't do one-size-fits-all. Some sites worry about water, others energy. Now flash forward: Sherry, how do you see the future?

S

Sherry3:00:43

The digital twin story is an 'and', not 'or'. We need to work with clients where they are today, but also design factories for future complexity. That can be a game-changer. Also, we need to show 'human in the lead' to eliminate fear about job loss. Jobs will elevate.

T

Todd Weatherby3:02:12

Great. Adaptability in design and people. Belen, how about a few years out?

B

Belen3:02:31

Two key things: make digital twins automated to execute actions, and move towards AI/GenAI with humans in the loop for real-time decision-making. So we see trends and can advise on disruptions.

T

Todd Weatherby3:03:25

I think there are opportunities in specific locations and also enterprise-level data optimization across the system. Thank you both. Please give a round of applause.

H

Host3:04:17

We have something for you from our customers. Todd gets something too. We're saying goodbye to LinkedIn Live. Next talk: innovation starting in university labs. Please welcome Professor Christian Brecher and Dr. Carl Morse.

Welcome. How are you? Let's do brief intros. Christian, tell us about yourself.

C

Christian Brecher3:05:35

Pretty good. I'm at RWTH Aachen, responsible for machine tool automation, robotics, gear technology. Also head of Fraunhofer Institute for production technology.

H

Host3:06:00

Thanks. And Carl, what do you do at Siemens?

C

Carl Morse3:06:05

I lead research and pre-development at Siemens, a global team of 1,200 in seven countries, working on Siemens technologies.

H

Host3:06:19

Thanks. Christian, universities are often seen as theory. How has the role of academia changed in industrial innovation?

C

Christian Brecher3:06:50

Universities do basic research. In engineering, we always ask about relevance and transfer to industry. About 30-40% of our budget goes into industrial contacts.

H

Host3:07:23

Carl, why is collaboration with universities important for Siemens?

C

Carl Morse3:07:34

Universities are our technology radar, helping see the future. They work on foundational research we lack capacity for. Collaboration on complex topics is valuable. The validation cycle of taking ideas from university to industry is critical.

H

Host3:08:31

Neither can do it alone. Carl, how do these projects help real production processes?

C

Carl Morse3:08:54

We start with an idea, develop a proof of concept, then create a product. Example: 'Run My Robot Direct Control' with Christian's team enables robots with measurement for machining. It's now a market solution.

H

Host3:10:01

Christian, from your perspective?

C

Christian Brecher3:10:04

Since Industry 4.0 in 2011, we need access to real machine data. Collaboration with Siemens opened doors to data we normally can't get.

H

Host3:10:38

Data spaces and alliances are important. Christian, how are they transforming industry?

C

Christian Brecher3:11:02

Data alliances are important for trust. We need a neutral platform for safe data sharing. Siemens is active in standardization for safe data storage, key for Industry 4.0.

H

Host3:11:46

Do you agree, Cal?

C

Carl Morse3:11:48

Absolutely. Data is a strategic asset needing sovereignty. Project Factory X created a space for partners to share data. The university's neutral role ensures trust.

H

Host3:12:38

Now physical AI is hot. Cal, how is academia-industry collaboration working in that area?

C

Carl Morse3:13:03

Very significant. Many physical AI technologies originated in universities: VLA models, reinforcement learning, domain randomization. The innovation cycle is rapid due to collaboration. We show robots in the Innovation Hub based on university research.

H

Host3:14:14

Christian, do you agree the optimization cycle is increasing?

C

Christian Brecher3:14:20

Fully agree. We are opening up new production generations. It's about using AI and human intelligence. Engineers must decide on safety. Working on foundation models for physical systems brings research directly to industry.

H

Host3:15:08

Human in the loop. Now humanoids. Christian, what do you think?

C

Christian Brecher3:15:33

Huge potential. Industry places designed for humans could be substitutes. But safety must be ensured. I'm convinced they'll have a place in the near future.

H

Host3:16:13

Cal, people worry about humanoids. Can you calm them?

C

Carl Morse3:16:28

Humanoids are extremely complex, harder than electric cars. We need university collaboration. We approach safety with a cognition layer for intelligence and a safety layer with guardrails. Safety is designed in from the start.

H

Host3:17:49

Where can people see more?

C

Carl Morse3:18:00

At the Innovation Hub, we show work developed in the lab now tested in factories with cobot arms and humanoids.

H

Host3:18:17

One takeaway on collaboration? First Cal, then Christian.

C

Carl Morse3:18:24

The shortest way from idea to impact goes through collaboration, and university is the best partner.

C

Christian Brecher3:18:31

Strategic alliances like this bring fundamental research into industrial applications. Perfect alliance with Siemens for decades.

H

Host3:18:48

Thank you. Applause for Christian and Cal. Christian, a gift from Natura. Next session, handover to Oliver Yuensen.

If you want more about academia collaboration, Friday is for talent. Now next session. I hand over to Oliver Yuensen.

The stage is all yours, Oliver.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:19:55

So, welcome, Patrick.

P

Patrick3:19:57

Yeah, thank you for having me here again. I was here a couple of years ago, so nice to be back.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:20:04

It's great to have you. I'd introduce you: Patrick is director for software and digitalization at GEA with five years as head of software development. You know challenges of deploying machines and integration.

P

Patrick3:20:39

Yeah, we have many challenges from sales. We are based in Oelde, part of the PFP division. We have a long history building centrifuges for over 3,000 processes. Standardization is key. We are at the CPG beverage model, but there are other industries.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:21:12

Later we'll see Peter, our expert at the CPG model. He'll show technical details. He's project manager at GEA Westfalia Separator.

P

Patrick3:21:36

Yeah. Exactly.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:21:37

Before diving into technology, could you briefly introduce GEA and why this modular separator skid is central?

P

Patrick3:22:00

GEA is a global engineering company for food, beverage, pharmaceutical, chemical. We are the separators business unit. We build centrifuges for thousands of processes. Standardization is important.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:22:44

Technical challenges: the world moves faster, flexibility needed. How do you bring mechanical, electrical, module engineering together with standards and tools?

P

Patrick3:23:23

It starts with sales tools for structured data. Then process and mechanical engineering with interfaces. For automation and panel design, interfaces are key. Then we deliver software for the skid. Today we demonstrate end-to-end tool chain. Peter will show live.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:24:18

Exactly. Peter, show us live.

P

Peter3:24:43

Modules on a separator GSX 260 for beverage. I'll show MTP integration in TIA Portal. We use MTP templates, Co-pilot for programming and documentation. For validation, we use Simit and rapid tester for automatic tests. Then we create MTP file with MTP Studio. Customer can integrate into WinCC Neo or Unified. After implementation I hand over to Patrick.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:26:27

Thanks.

P

Patrick3:26:29

Thank you, Peter. The skid is ready. We deliver benefits: Simit makes it error-free, MTP allows one-click integration. You import MTP file into WinCC Unified, connect, compile, hit runtime, and get full integration.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:28:06

Scalability: this works for PCS Neo and PCS 7 too. How does this quick solution help customers in other branches?

P

Patrick3:28:36

We deliver separators for 3,500 processes across many industries. Our team standardizes software, so any skid is 100% MTP ready for easy integration.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:29:11

Siemens addresses same branches and drives standards like MTP 2.0. We offer portfolio around TIA Portal, MTP Studio, Simit, digital twin, and orchestration with PCS 7 to PCS Neo and WinCC Unified.

P

Patrick3:29:57

Exactly. MTP is an open standard used everywhere, making it a fantastic tool for machine builders.

O

Oliver Yuensen3:30:19

Standardization is a game-changer. Looking ahead, which technologies are next drivers? How important are communication and data transfer for AI?

P

Patrick3:30:45

OT and IT are becoming one world. AI agents and data are available, but you need standards first. We use AI for better engineering and to give customers confidence. Standardization is key for digitalization across the value chain.

U

Unknown3:31:39

Everybody can benefit from it.

S

Siemens Representative3:31:45

Exactly. There is a paradox: we need to use agents but they must work together. The next game changer will be a personalized orchestration layer where all agents collaborate. We are here at the CPG area with a skit. If you have questions on MTP, AI, Simatic, digitalization, simulation, approach our booth. We are here until Friday. Let's talk.

M

Max3:32:45

That's great. Also find related products on other dialog stations and partner booths regarding standardization, WinCC Unified, SIMATIC PCS Neo. A big thank you to our colleagues and audience. Please come to us. Thank you.

Thank you very much. And Natura, not too far away from you guys.

S

Siemens Representative3:33:19

Yeah, I've seen it already.

M

Max3:33:20

That's for you. Thank you very much.

G

Guest 13:33:22

Natura using our simulation software to extract essential oils in the Amazon.

M

Max3:33:26

Thank you. And uh Oliver, this is for you as well. Also from Natura.

G

Guest 13:33:31

Great job. This is very good. And enjoy the rest of the fair. Thank you.

Thank you.

M

Max3:33:42

And we're going to continue the program here. Up next, we have a presentation about process industries. We'll discover how a defined life cycle protects investments and saves costs. Please welcome Markus Weinländer and Werner Heuberger. Welcome.

M

Markus Weinländer3:34:22

A warm welcome from my side and our side here at Hannover and online. Werner, it's great to have you. What are you doing here on stage today?

W

Werner Heuberger3:34:34

I'm here to meet customers and colleagues. I'm on stage to talk about the life cycle business in process industries and how we protect customer investments.

M

Markus Weinländer3:34:54

Same topic applies to me. I'm a software guy talking about software tools and AI. Process industries produce healthy food, safe water, medications, cozy houses. It's technology with purpose. Plants run for 20-40 years. Customers want to keep investments, but updates are needed due to aging workforce, rising energy costs, productivity, quality, and regulations like NIS2. We use AI to optimize PID controls, saving energy and reducing waste. But AI requires data, which is hard to access in older plants.

W

Werner Heuberger3:37:28

Exactly. Those plants are built to run for 25 years. Customers can't replace them overnight. They need to bring their automation to the latest stage while managing risk and downtime. Our challenge is to protect investments and prepare plants for the future under cost control.

M

Markus Weinländer3:38:25

We have 35,000 PCS 7 installations globally. We feel responsible to help customers use those investments as long as possible. Modernization is not just about cost; it's about knowledge and IP. Replacing everything is not wise or possible. We enable customers to protect existing installations while opening the door to innovations. Three-step approach: build a digital twin, upgrade and validate using our upgrade factory, then deploy and validate. We do this continuously.

W

Werner Heuberger3:41:42

We have many upgrade examples. One in Africa with tough timeline and cost pressure. We managed successfully, and the customer is happy with a future-proof plant.

M

Markus Weinländer3:42:43

We also automate the process with our evolution program. It includes a readiness assessment tool to analyze PCS 7 projects, standardization with advanced process library, and migration to PCS Neo. PCS Neo version 7 is out. It lowers total operating lifecycle cost, offers cloud engineering, digital twins, remote access, and parallel testing. Customers can migrate at their own pace.

W

Werner Heuberger3:46:15

To sum up: investment protection is key. We ensure the automation system is up to date while protecting the plant. Three-step: build digital twin, validate, deploy. Go with us and you have investment protection.

M

Markus Weinländer3:47:06

Three takeaways: 1) Siemens cares about the installed base. 2) Start today with readiness and plan at your pace. 3) Siemens offers a helping hand for safe migration with minimal downtime. Process industries are evolving, and automation must evolve with it. Visit us at booth 147 or online. Thank you.

M

Max3:48:34

Thank you very much, gentlemen. Here is something from Natura to take home. Up next, we have a session on Pyrum Innovations maximizing recycling efficiency with Simatic PCS Neo. Please welcome Christian Maass and Matthias Maurer Meier.

Welcome. Great to have you here. First, thank you for being here. This is a sustainability success story. Christian, can you tell us what Pyrum does and what the innovative approach is?

C

Christian Maass3:50:11

We develop and operate recycling technologies for non-recyclable waste streams. We have a patented reactor technology to process end-of-life tires and give them new life as new tires or products from pyrolysis oil.

M

Max3:50:35

You are technical director. What are you currently working on?

C

Christian Maass3:50:43

I take responsibility for the technical division, all engineering departments, projects with customers, and operation at our site in Dillingen. When we started with Siemens three years ago, I was in charge of process automation for the plant expansion.

M

Max3:51:16

What challenges did you face and what led you to call Matthias?

C

Christian Maass3:51:28

We are a young, small team with experience only from our pilot plant. We searched for a reliable, easy-to-use process control system. That's how Siemens came in.

M

Max3:52:10

Which Siemens solution did you go for and why?

C

Christian Maass3:52:16

We chose PCS Neo version 3.1 because we wanted a web-based system with lean architecture, easy access and setup. We also wanted virtual commissioning with Simit simulation and MTP standard for integrating third-party systems.

M

Max3:53:10

Matthias, how does Simatic PCS Neo address these challenges?

M

Matthias Maurer Meier3:53:29

We are proud to support Pyrum with our portfolio. PCS Neo offers ease of use, multi-user engineering, remote engineering, Simit integration, and MTP. That's why they chose it even in the early days.

M

Max3:54:32

How important is modularity (MTP) for your business?

C

Christian Maass3:54:48

Our pyrolysis process is the core, but we have other utilities that need integration. MTP made that fast with low engineering effort. It reduced system integration and signal check time.

M

Matthias Maurer Meier3:55:36

Openness and modularization are foundational for adaptability and resilience. We built them into PCS Neo. It starts with standardization and drives benefits for Pyrum and all customers.

M

Max3:56:03

There's a short video showing Pyrum driving sustainability with PCS Neo. Let's take a look.

Christian, what have been the most noticeable improvements since having PCS Neo?

C

Christian Maass3:56:39

The highest benefit is in day-to-day operation. Standardization and the advanced process library make it easy for operators, especially new ones. Simulation integration allows pre-commissioning and operator training. With only two automation engineers, we did all engineering in-house. New team members were able to support commissioning within days or weeks.

M

Max3:57:53

What did the collaboration look like?

C

Christian Maass3:58:09

We searched for a partnership, not just a manufacturer. We jointly advance technologies. Last year we pre-tested safety functionalities released in version six.

M

Max3:58:51

Matthias, how has the collaboration been?

M

Matthias Maurer Meier3:58:53

It's a partnership throughout the whole life cycle: from basic engineering to operation and innovation. That's what I appreciate.

M

Max3:59:37

Looking to the future, Christian, what are your next steps?

C

Christian Maass3:59:50

We are now using the life cycle platform Comos for engineering. Next steps: integrating our pilot plant into PCS Neo for a shared operating system. PCS Neo will be the foundation for all upcoming projects.

M

Max4:00:47

Matthias, what does the future hold?

M

Matthias Maurer Meier4:00:51

PCS Neo version 7 is out. We'll roll it out at Pyrum fast. We focus on safety, scaling, technological engineering. Next year version 8 with batch. We are moving to software-defined automation with IT-like principles. We will use AI where it helps in engineering and operation.

M

Max4:02:39

PCS 8 next year at Hannover Messe? Every April release. Version 7 this year, version 8 with batch next year. We're looking forward. Matthias, where can visitors find you at the booth?

M

Matthias Maurer Meier4:03:23

PCS Neo is in booth 151. Christian and I will be there for the next half hour. Also, MTP modular automation is in several spots on the booth.

M

Max4:03:57

Big round of applause for Christian and Matthias. Thank you. Here is something from Natura.

We have a bit of time left. I want to explain the other areas. In the middle is the technology deep dive area with four islands: smart manufacturing, advanced machine engineering, electrification and buildings, accelerated product development. On the far side is the innovation hub focusing on infrastructure, flexible production with industrial foundation models, and flexible products. We have AI-customized shoe soles. Check if we're ready for next session. Melissa!

M

Melissa4:06:59

Hi everybody.

M

Max4:07:00

It's going cool. You know what country says 'Kredite mit den Hand'? Switzerland. And we're going to talk about chocolate? Well, Bühler is also good. Take it away, Malisha.

M

Melissa4:07:18

Bühler and Siemens are true partners working side by side to turn digital ambition into real impact. We have two gentlemen joining me: Ben from Bühler and Andy from Siemens. Please join us.

M

Max4:08:10

When I think of Ben and Jerry, I think of Tom and Jerry. There's also ice cream. Anyway, I'll leave you guys. I look forward to learning about collaboration.

A

Andy4:08:39

Good afternoon everyone. Benjamin, if we had been standing here 10 years ago, would we have talked about digital journey, digital twins, simulation?

B

Ben4:08:55

Ten years ago, Bühler had customer-facing solutions like MyBühler and Bühler Insights, but not to this extent. Engineering relied on Excel, drawings, meetings. The industry has changed.

A

Andy4:09:30

Absolutely. Today we talk about Bühler's digital journey and how we create value together. CPG companies face rising pressure. They must balance cost efficiency with innovation, improve supply chain transparency, meet sustainability goals, and adopt new technologies.

B

Ben4:10:20

Before challenges, a brief intro: Bühler is a family-owned company from Uzwil, Switzerland, 165 years old, present in 140 countries. We are an OEM in food and advanced materials. 60% of world chocolate comes from Bühler machines, 65% of flour, 20% of ink. We also sell plants, consulting, and after-sales services.

A

Andy4:11:52

But now the challenges.

B

Ben4:11:55

Bühler faces high market volatility, geopolitical uncertainties, cost pressure, demand for shorter life cycles. We must innovate beyond mechanics. CPG customers expect high efficiency, flexibility, sustainability, availability. Traditional engineering reaches limits. Automation and simulation become critical.

A

Andy4:12:57

With TIA Portal from Siemens, we have a good solution for engineering automation systems. We can store recipes, use AI to document solutions. TIA Portal is a co-pilot for engineering. Simulation transforms the game. We can see before anything exists, identify risks early, compare variants, make cost and energy impacts transparent, and make fact-based decisions. It shifts from reaction to anticipation.

B

Ben4:14:25

Let's look at a Bühler showcase: the MicroMedia and Netzsch 3 bead mill machine. It grinds material to nano scale, used for battery materials, food, inks, agrochemicals. In the past, it took expertise to build. With billions of beads, slight metric changes affect the whole process. It was a black box. Now with digital twin, we can shorten this process.

A

Andy4:16:10

Digital twin enables prediction, visualization, optimization. Multiphysics simulations in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ give insight into every stage, allowing engineers to troubleshoot, adjust parameters, and validate design before prototype.

B

Ben4:17:01

We can simulate every parameter and see bead behavior, temperature, tip speed. We see it before a single part is built. This reduces engineering time, gives more security, makes it faster and cheaper.

A

Andy4:17:48

For Bühler customers, that means shorter time to market, lower commissioning risks, optimized energy and resource usage.

B

Ben4:18:11

Simulation doesn't solve all problems, but together with Siemens we differentiate beyond mechanics, optimize cost base, shorten lead time. Next: expand simulation to other machines.

A

Andy4:19:15

Partnership means sharing knowledge, responsibility, and vision. Bühler's digital journey is a continuous path. Thank you for your attention. You will find us in station 123-125 in the CPG showcase. We also have an augmented reality experience. Come and see the machine from the inside out.

M

Max4:20:19

Gentlemen, we don't let you go empty-handed. Thanks to Natura. Thank you very much. I love to keep it for myself; it smells heavenly. My wife will be happy.

B

Ben4:20:45

I know she will. Thank you guys.

M

Max4:20:47

Thank you. Danke vielmals.

We've been talking about the digital journey. Our colleagues have put together a video about the future of industry and AI. Let's have a look.

N

Narrator4:21:16

Welcome to the new industrial revolution. An era where data drives decisions, systems become adaptive and autonomous. Industrial AI is built on three pillars: technology stack, domain know-how, strong partnerships. See it in action: a new order comes in, the production line adjusts. With a few prompts, adaptive production becomes possible. Technology stack, software enhanced by AI, hardware that connects, and data tie it all together. Domain know-how ensures AI understands industry reality. Strong partnerships make it scalable. This is how Siemens accelerates the industrial AI revolution with real solutions delivering real impact.

M

Max4:23:32

Not bad, right? They did a good job. We have some empty seats. We are ready for our next session on sustainability.

Increasingly important. And we at Siemens are of course focusing on intelligent future-ready solutions. And up next, we're going to be talking about a soft starter that is not new. And precisely for that reason, it is especially innovative. So, please give a warm welcome to my three guests, Yusuf, Johannes, and Kristoffer. Welcome. Yusuf, hi. Please have a seat on stage. Thank you. Hi. Welcome. Kristoffer, hi. How's it going, gentlemen? Day three in Hanover. All good?

Y

Yusuf4:24:37

It's my first one.

M

Max4:24:40

Your first one, I know. I know. So all three of these guys have extensive expertise in industrial automation, sustainability, and circular economy solutions. Yusuf, you are a technical applications consultant. Johannes is a mechanical engineer, and Christopher is a sustainability manager for electrical products. So, exactly the kind of people we want to have on stage for the next 15 minutes.

Christopher, maybe we can start with you. So, Siemens is investing heavily in circularity. It's one of our so-called must dimensions of our eco-design approach. And something you can also find in our ecotech framework, by the way. So, Chris, why are we doing this? Why are we investing so heavily? What's the motivation behind all of this?

C

Christopher4:25:35

Yes, well, so you know, the world is changing. Resources are becoming scarce. Not suddenly, but relentlessly. And we have to do something about it. It's a great opportunity, but it's also a great challenge. And we as Siemens, we face this challenge. Prices for resources are going up. Prices for oil is going up. Prices for metal, copper, and so on is going up. So, we need to react. We as Siemens, but also our customers, who face the same problem. And what we need to find is a new way of how we deal with our resources. And the answer is circular economy. Why? Because with circularity, we can move away from a linear economy, which is basically we produce a product with materials from our suppliers, and then we sell this product to our direct customers, which could be panel builders and others. The panel builders build a panel, and then they sell it again to the end user, and there our products have a very, very long life, but eventually these products break. They're at the end of their life. And at this point in the linear economy, let me put it like this, we can be happy if our customers put these devices to recycling. In many cases, what still happening today is that it lands on a landfill and the resources are gone. And this is really a big, big waste. And that's why our idea is to close these loops, to close the material loops. And this is really a new step to go ahead and become more resource efficient. And that's why we're doing it. It's a topic for us as Siemens, but it's also, most importantly, a topic for our customers because our customers, they face the same problems, the same issues we do. And our goal is to help our customers with their sustainability goals with our products and our solutions.

M

Max4:27:50

Thanks, Chris. So, Johannes, you've brought this wonderful thing here with you on stage. What is it and why do we need it?

J

Johannes4:27:59

This is a soft starter. Soft starters are in use where electrical motors have to be started in a controlled and gentle way. For example, in pumping, ventilation, compression, or material transport applications. Soft starter reduces the mechanical and electrical stress in these applications. But that's not new. We have been on the market since 7 years with this product. What we want to show here is a new variant of it, and that's a refurbished soft starter.

M

Max4:28:31

Refurbished. So, for some people, when they hear the word refurbished, they might think, 'Ooh, second hand.' Like when you buy a second hand car, and then it's like, 'Oh, is it as good as the real thing as a new one?' So, the question here would be, is the SIRIUS soft starter really as good and as reliable as a new one? Short and clear answer for us, yes, it is.

J

Johannes4:28:55

For us, it is important to explain what we do in our refurbishment process to build trust in our new variant. In our refurbishment process is not an easy functional check of old devices or repairment where we only replace some defective components. With our refurbishment process, we build old devices, they work like new ones with the same lifetime, with the same technical data, and with the same warranty like a new one. We can achieve this by proactively replacement of functional components.

M

Max4:29:45

Mhm. So, how does it actually work then? Can you give us a few insights?

J

Johannes4:29:50

Yes. The soft starter is a fully digital device with some flash memory inside and log files. These log files give us some deep insight what happened while the first life cycle with each product. With these log files and further analysis, we are able to create an individual refurbishment plan for each device. For this process, we set lifetime parameters behind each component. For example, housing parts, aluminum heating profiles, or copper bus bars have a much longer lifetime than mechanically or electrically stressed components like silver switching contacts. After the refurbishment, we go into our serial line production for the final testing. That means our refurbished soft starter is tested in exactly the same way like a brand new one. With our process, our knowledge in these devices, our 7 years of market experience, and our end-of-line testing, we can provide our new refurbished soft starter with the same quality and the same warranty like a new device. Our refurbished soft starter have a full CE certification and meet all necessary quality and safety aspects.

M

Max4:31:09

So, in addition, Youssef, to yes, it's the same quality, yes, it's the same reliability, what other benefits are there for people who would choose a circular one over a new one?

Y

Yusuf4:31:20

Well, we have a lot of benefits. The process is actually very straightforward for our customers. They can return their old soft starter, and we will make sure that it is reused or recycled in a proper way. And I think one of the biggest advantages would be the environmental impact. A circular soft starter reduces 50% CO2 emissions compared to a soft starter that is being produced from scratch. I think this is very impressive. I mean, 50%. And this makes it also easier for our customers to reach their sustainability targets. But we also have some practical benefits. A circular soft starter is available faster, which means and I think this is very crucial in times of supply chain uncertainty. For our customers, this means shorter delivery times, but also a better planning security on the long run. And as my colleague correctly said, there is no compromise on quality. A circular soft starter meets the same technical standard as a new one. So, the devices are always up-to-date, including all functionalities such as braking methods or the full compatibility with existing installations. So, we have a lot of benefits as you can see, but to make it short, customers, they get a circular solution with no compromise on quality, functionality, or performance, while supporting sustainability, but also improving availability at the same time.

M

Max4:32:42

Thank you. Now, Chris, we've had one or two sessions here already, and also Monday, Tuesday about cybersecurity, and they were talking about new regulations coming in, NIS 2, CRA, et cetera. The same applies for these sustainability products as well. We have rules and regulations coming up for circularity data. For example, for circular transparency with a digital product passport. So, what do you say, Chris? Are we ready for these new regulations?

C

Christopher4:33:14

Yes, of course. We are absolutely ready for it. And I think it's even better we are prepared for all this type of regulation, but our goal is to go beyond the regulation, to go ahead of the regulation. So, our goal is to check out which are the customer use cases, which are their requirements in terms of circular data architecture, circular and sustainability data, and so on. So, this is our goal, to go beyond it. And if you talk about the ESPR, the European Sustainable Product Regulation, which is one of the very, very big regulations, which define the digital product passport, so, we don't have a delegated act yet for our type of products. We're waiting for it, so that it's clearly defined which kind of data we need to provide in this DPP. So, this is one thing, but we are ready as I said, if you have a look into our product, you will find a QR code on the top side. This is instance-based, meaning there's also the serial number included in this QR code. We call it ID link and the advantage is first of all, customers can take their smartphone, they can scan it and they get all the information they need like paper manuals is not needed anymore because we can provide our customers with digital paper documentation, but also this is the base for the DPP. This is our carrier and we have implemented it as you can see it. So, I don't worry about regulation so much. I worry more about what are the real customer use cases, how can we help our customers to become more sustainable and to help them with their real use cases and real requirements.

M

Max4:35:04

Thank you. Josef, you spoke about benefits before. Now, looking at the entire conversation here, what would you like to give our audience on their way back home? What should they take away and remember?

Y

Yusuf4:35:17

I mean, as we heard from Chris, choosing a circular soft starter means also to be ready for regulation, but I think choosing a circular soft starter is also not just about compliance. It's about building a system that is flexible, sustainable, but also future-proof. Yeah, definitely.

M

Max4:35:34

Chris, we already have it at the back. Where can people find out more about this and where can they speak to you three here at the booth?

C

Christopher4:35:41

Yes, so we have our Siemens Ecotec booth right in this direction. It's number 180. And we are very happy. We are waiting there for you. We would very much like to discuss these kind of topics, to talk about your use cases, to talk about advantages that we can provide you with our products and also about Siemens ecotech which is the base for this all, you know, because with Siemens ecotech we define how we do eco design and we also define how we do circular design and as you said Max at the beginning circular design has always been part of Siemens ecotech. We have the third dimension value recovery and circularity so it's always been defined and if you want to learn more about it just come over, we're very happy to see you there.

M

Max4:36:33

Great. Yusuf, this is day one for you. Exactly. So you're here until Friday? Until Friday. Until Friday, okay. Johannes? I will leave tomorrow. You'll leave tomorrow, okay. You've been here since Monday. No, since yesterday. Since yesterday, okay. And you're going to complete the other days then. Yes, I know I arrived on Sunday. Okay. And I will leave this afternoon but there are some other colleagues who know everything about circularity, about eco design and about the soft starters and yes. Great. So you're covering the whole week among yourselves, that's perfect. So this is your chance, go and grab one of them, find out more about our amazing circular soft starter and with that can we please have a big round of applause for Yusuf, Johannes and Chris. Thank you very much.

And we have something for you as well gentlemen from Natura, our CPG showcase. They're over there from Brazil, bar of soap each. Natura optimizing the extraction of essential oils using our digital twin also worth a look. Thanks again and see you soon.

And with that ladies and gentlemen, we are just about ready for our next session. Are we keeping this here? Yeah, we'll keep it here. Perfect. So power utilities worldwide are under unprecedented pressure. Pressure from growing electrification, from aging infrastructure, and from rising system complexity. And all of this is pushing today's protection and control systems to their limits. And we have virtualized protection and control, and that enables us to introduce next-generation innovation, and this opens the door to advanced applications, including, of course, artificial intelligence. Here to tell us more, please welcome on stage global product manager here at Siemens, Saurabh Talwar. Welcome.

S

Saurabh Talwar4:38:49

All right. Awesome. Thanks, Max, for the introduction, and hi and warm welcome from my side, as well. So, I've been in this industry for power grids approximately around 14 years. And there's something that is happening in this industry that has never happened before. So, there are three main challenges this industry is facing that is converging at the same time. The first big challenge is we need to increase the grid capacity in the next 10 years. We have to double the grid capacity in the next 10 years. And that is due to because we're building a lot of AI infrastructure, everything is getting electrified, there's a big demand for energy in this industry. The second big challenge is to modernize. There's a big pressure to modernize an existing aging infrastructure. We need to roll things out much faster, we need to make sure we can automate as much as possible, and we need to make sure we can standardize solutions for our customers. The solution should be flexible, scalable, and adaptable for the future. The third big challenge, what I call it, is the people factor. There's a big lack of skilled expertise in our industry, and because of this lack of expertise, there's a big pressure to do modernization and to increase grid capacity. The existing skilled workers are going into retirement, and the younger force is coming into this workforce, and there's a bit of a user expectation change. Now, we're talking about power, we're talking about critical infrastructure. So, what is it? Let's have a look. So, protection is indeed very critical, and the protection responsibility is to identify a fault and isolate it. If it fails to isolate, we will end up in a power outage. There was a power outage scenario in Spain last year, and also in Czech Republic last year. Some of you guys might already have witnessed it. So, this is the impact of protection on power grids. Sometimes I feel we take it for granted because we consume energy on a daily basis. Events like power outages makes us really realize how reliant we are on energy. Now, protection has evolved over the years, right? So, the question is, what's next? So, I was actually at an event in Norway to do a keynote speaking event, and I actually arrived 1:00 a.m. in the morning. So, I enabled ChatGPT on my phone, and I enabled voice, and I asked ChatGPT, 'What's the next evolution for protection in secondary substations?' Somehow it understood sanitary substations. I said okay, that's a great start already. Let us see what else the chat GPT is going to output. But I was really surprised that it clearly identified the context. It said you're probably talking about secondary substations and not sanitary substations. And I was really surprised what the outcome was. So it said that we started with electromechanical relays in the very beginning. We had numerical relays introduced in our industry. We had smart meters introduced in our industry and the next generation is virtualization. So focusing on protection as software or a software defined solution for protection and focusing on AI applications on the edge. And that is exactly what this whole talk is all about. Now, how can virtualization really help in our industry? Instead of showing you some slides, let's try to understand this with a more interactive experience. So this is what a typical power grid infrastructure looks like. So, you have on the left side primary equipments. So these are big massive equipments like breakers and transformers. So they're actually installed in the field and all the power cabling that's been outputted from these primary equipments, they get connected to something what we call a marshalling cabinet. Which is something you can see on the left. Now from this marshalling cabinet, you have copper cables going through trenches all the way to the substation building. Right? Now with virtualization, what we are trying to do here is that we are trying to reduce the copper cables in the trenches which you can see it's trying to get reduced and we're trying to install a sensor in the marshalling cabinet and that sensor is responsible for analog values to digital values. So, all information will be sent over fiber optics to the substation building. Now, because of this whole concept and design, we can reduce the copper cable cost by up to 80%. And due to copper cable reduction, we can reduce or we can enhance sustainability by 50%. Now, this is what's happening in the field. So if we zoom out a bit and we go inside the substation, so these are control buildings where we actually deploy embedded devices, the control system, the SCADA system aspect. So, we have to build these panels and panels and panels, depending how big or small the configuration of a site looks like. Now, in these panels, we install our embedded IED devices. They are fixed-function hardware that is responsible for doing a dedicated function. Now, what's happening with virtualization is we are decoupling the software from these embedded boxes and we are hosting them on an industrial PC. Now, this PC can host up to 60 virtual IEDs. So, you can have a main system and then you can have a backup system. Now, because of a drastic reduction in the panel quantities we would need, we can reduce the footprint of a control building by up to 45%. And we can reduce the panel cost by up to 25%. Some might say, 'Why 25? Because we reduced from 20 panels down to two panels, for example. It should be 80%.' And that's a good question, but we need to consider the marshalling panels and the junction boxes that we built in the field, which I showed you before, where we installed the sensors. So, overall, we can reduce the panel cost down by 25%. Now, this is a software-defined concept. Now, this whole concept allows us to now host very advanced AI applications on the industrial servers. And this is something what Siemens is focusing on, how to make the critical infrastructure like a power grid more smarter in the future using AI. And specific use cases using AI for fault detection purposes. So, this is just a bit of a glimpse as to what virtualization is changing and how in a software defined world we are going towards and all the KPIs and the benefits that a customer could experience because of virtualization. Now, this is a product that Siemens has. So, technically, what is it really called? Can we switch over to great? So, this is a product. So, we have decided to go for SIPROTEC V. So, SIPROTEC is an existing portfolio for our protection embedded devices. As since we are virtualizing those embedded devices, we decided to go for a V in the end. So, it's virtualizing the existing SIPROTEC portfolio. So, that's it from my side. It's a pleasure talking to you guys. If you guys are further interested in this whole topic, we have a booth at the Innovation Hub and the booth number is 65. We'll be more than happy to talk to you about this. Thanks a lot.

M

Max4:47:03

Ask a question. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Do you want to take that with you? Yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you. Awesome. Great demonstration.

So, thank you, Timo. Timo's cameo moment on stage. Round of applause for Timo. He doesn't come on stage often. Something for you to take home later on. So, are we keeping this or not? Quick question. Frank, are we keeping this? Maybe we can Thank you very much, Tina. So, for everyone who's just made their way into our hall, welcome. Welcome to Hanover. Welcome to Hall 27. Welcome to Siemens. This is the place where we are showcasing what we are doing in electrification, automation, and digitalization. And we've been doing that for the past 175 years. We've been showing how we can make that real for both industry and infrastructure. And now, we are adding AI, industrial-grade AI, and we're adding it to the entire value chain, end-to-end, in order for our customers to benefit even more. Why are we doing this? Because we are leaders in industrial software, in automation, and in industrial-grade AI. And because we have the right partners in place, our partner ecosystem, which can help us scale fast. Because speed matters. We are helping our customers to move at the speed of software along their entire digital transformation journey, and we're doing that with the help of Siemens accelerator, for example. Siemens accelerator, our open digital business platform, which is helping our customers remain resilient, more competitive, or rather resilient, competitive, and future-ready. Siemens accelerator is based on three core elements. It's an open and curated modular portfolio of IoT-enabled hardware, software, and services from Siemens and from qualified marketplace sellers. It's an open and growing ecosystem of established companies, of startups, and of developers who all adhere to common design principles. And it's an evolving marketplace where the ecosystem members come together to explore, to interact, and to exchange digital offerings. And all of this is helping make the customer transformation journey easier, faster, and more scalable. What does that mean? Easier means clear guidance, a seamless technical fit, and of course simplified processes. Faster means we are removing barriers, technical, organizational, resource-related. There are no more. And number three, at scale. We start small where the customer is, and we grow as its business grows. And here in Hanover, Siemens Accelerator is the launchpad that is enabling AI to transfer from experimentation to real-world deployment at scale. So, it's the go-to platform for AI. It's your gateway to AI-powered innovation. And it empowers everything and everyone. These are tailor-made solutions, tailor-made AI solutions for every small and medium-size business. And also on Siemens Accelerator, we have a learning hub, which is providing essential upskilling for industry to help it be ready for the future. And that's just one of the many more things that you're going to be able to find here at our booth. It's structured into three parts. We have the digital enterprise end-to-end showcase for the consumer packaged goods industry where we show how we can contribute with our three key building blocks, software-defined systems, comprehensive digital twin, and industrial-grade AI, where we show how we can get from the design of the product all the way through to when the product hits the supermarket shelf. Over there, we have our innovation hub where we are showing the industry of the future. We have physical AI, for example, robots and AGVs that can perceive and act autonomously. And in the center, we have our technology deep dive area with our four customer islands which are basically simulating the digital threads that the customer moves along. And with that, we are now ready for our next talk here on stage. And we're going to be talking about DC power distribution. And the Siemens Technology Campus in Erlangen, that serves as a real lighthouse project for modern DC application. And by integrating advanced DC technologies into the site's energy system, the campus can demonstrate how DC enables higher efficiency, easier integration of renewables and storage, and more flexible industrial power architectures. So, basically, it acts as both a research environment and as a practical blueprint for the transition from conventional AC grids to future-ready DC infrastructures. And we're going to find out more from my three guests as they make their way up, while you watch this short video.

So, this is the Technology Campus Erlangen. It's a really nice video. And I'm happy to be joined by our wonderful three guests. They're all from Siemens. We have Julia. Julia is the head of product management low-voltage switchboards. Welcome. We have Joachim. Joachim Seidel, he is responsible for system management and is a member of the board of Open DC Alliance ODCA. Welcome, Joachim. And on the far side, we have Dr. Nico Fritsch, who is a product manager for semiconductor circuit breakers SCCB. Hi, Nico. It's great to have all three of you here in Hanover. Thanks for making the journey here. Joachim, I'd like to start with you, if I may. In your view, what is the strategic reason that DC is moving from a rather niche topic now into more conventional systems?

J

Joachim Seidel4:54:37

Thank you for this question. DC at very first is pretty old, more than 100 years old. And maybe the people are not aware DC technology is older than AC technology. But with the reference to the lots of discussion I made during the last days, I learned the upcoming the really huge increase of upcoming AI data center. They are pushing everything. Just to give you a little bit an estimation about the demand itself. Right now, we are speaking about rack densities of 100 kW, maybe 150 kW. These new AI data center, they need power densities of 1 MW and more. And this is something which just can be realized by DC technology. Just to give you two or three facts about this. By doubling the voltage, you can half the current. You can reduce your power losses in the line by 75%. That's really something. But it has additional positive effects. Think about the half current, we just need the half of the wire. You can spare 50% of copper. 50% of copper means the wire is thinner, the plugs are thinner, and you spare space in your rack. Increasing the power density is a key enabler for new AI data centers. And an additional advantage of DC technology, think about right now AC needs three wires. By switching from AC to DC, you can spare one wire, you just need two wires anymore. You spare 33% of plugs and connectors, an additional space saving effect. These are some leading topics. At first, I wanted to speak about our production logistics center, but data center is much more impressive for this. And last positive aspect of DC technology, the new AI data center, they have to cope with huge increase, with huge power peaks. How can this be handled? This is one of the big big big tasks, also a little bit following our energy distribution challenges we have by upcoming renewable integration. And it's much more easy to integrate supercaps into an existing DC distribution system, which covers all these load peaks and easily can serve as a load demands of the racks. These are the most important topics for this DC change. So, many many benefits indeed.

M

Max4:57:33

So, it makes sense to switch. Why does it make sense to switch now rather than later?

J

Joachim Seidel4:57:42

This is also a good question. Thank you for this. Why now? While the last 10 years, we developed and we evaluated this DC story for industrial application really bulletproof. We started not just with the realization of first semiconductor circuit breaker. We learned later on much more about this. We also started to build up an whole ecosystem. A whole DC ecosystem including suppliers, the component suppliers, including also the standardization efforts. And the most important standard which covers the new semiconductor circuit breaker technology is right now in publication. We are waiting daily for the new standard which describes the semiconductor circuit breaker. Okay.

M

Max4:58:31

I'd like to turn now to you, Julia. I want to take a look into the details of power distribution. So, first off, what is actually the challenge when it comes to DC grids?

J

Julia4:58:45

The main challenge and a really big big change is the decentralization. So, in the past, we had consumers and producers of power far away from each other. Now, we have it all together. So, loads are much closer to a distribution. Think of PV, think of EV charging. So, you have your neighbor feeding your car in the ideal case. Which means also the protection has to move much closer to go to consumers. And here we have our type-tested approach with bus ducts and switchboards coming together. So, we want to have short distances, clear routes of the current, and really close protection. We see in our innovation hub an example of a switchboard with the solid-state circuit breaker in eye level. If you have a closer or small roof, you can also have the solid-state circuit breaker in the energy box of the bus duct. Both is possible, both helps you in decentralization. Now, obviously making a change like this one is not going to happen overnight, I assume. So, what are we talking here? Yeah, I mean, it is not happening overnight, and I think AC consumers will remain. So, we will have hybrid systems for a very, very long time. And even our IEC standards looking to bus ducts and switchboards, we see there is one standard covering both. So, one standard for AC and same standard for DC. What we as a Siemens want to make our customers the transition easy, we will have the proven portfolio, the known behavior of our switchboards also on the DC. So, both is possible, AC and DC. Now, the technology alone though is not going to be enough, right? Someone has to design these systems, someone has to ultimately also make them safe. Who are these people doing these jobs? Yeah, we know that there is a completely new know-how needed in the environment with the planners, with the ones on the plans. And here we have our totally integrated power supporting our planners or whoever wants to engineer these DC systems, to plan these DC systems and really support our customer. And you mentioned switchboards and bus ducts already. What will DC ultimately mean for these things? Yeah, you can compare DC like driving a car really constant speed on the highway. So, you don't have any stop and go like with the AC. That means you don't have any friction. Much less energy loss as you have already said. We see that we can use the same system with much higher ratings. Here we have this less energy loss, but there's also a challenge in this, yeah? So, a challenge in the devices in the semiconductor devices which are producing a lot of heat. And with this challenge, we have solutions where for schooling comes in, where we can see how to cool the switchboard outside. We can see this in the Sivacon S8 over there. And finally, which is a huge advantage of the new solid state breakers, short circuits are dramatically reduced. So, that means less mechanical stress inside our switchboards. Okay.

M

Max5:02:03

Nico, moving over to you. Now, I know you're a big supporter or a proponent of solid state protection, right? So, why is this one of the key enablers, if not the key enabler, to actually making these systems truly manageable under these fault conditions?

N

Nico Fritsch5:02:24

So, in reality, an end customer is not really interested in protection devices. Protection devices, they need to work. And that's why they are so important. So, without reliable protection, nothing else matters. And semiconductor based protection devices makes DC grid handleable because they see problems before anyone else sees them. So, protection is essential. I assume then one of the next obvious questions that we would ask would be I mean, why is this so much more critical in a DC environment than it is in an AC environment? So, the answer is simple but also critical. In DC systems, we don't have a zero crossing. In AC system, we have a zero crossing. In our protection device, we use the zero crossing to clear also the fault circuit. In DC, we don't have it and in case of a short circuit, we have a tremendous rise of the current and this needs to be handled. And that's exactly where semiconductor-based protection devices became essential because mechanical solutions are simply too slow. Slow. So, it's about speed. Speed is relative for some. Speed for me is probably something completely different than it is to you. What are we talking about when we talk about speed? I like the comparison with an airbag. An airbag in case of an accident deploys within milliseconds. And they save lives. But this speed is for modern DC grids even not fast enough. So, our semiconductor circuit breaker is up to 2,000 or 3,000 times faster than an airbag. And that's the speed you need in modern DC grids. That's pretty fast.

M

Max5:04:33

Also, Nico, some people have might have noticed it at the booth when they were over there. There's a light that lights up on the circuit breaker. For some, this might be an unusual way that it lights up or blinks. Can you tell us more about that?

N

Nico Fritsch5:04:51

Yes, it's not just a design gimmick. It's also functional. I already heard it looks like Night Rider. And we all heard from Joachim the integration of batteries. So, a battery can be charged or discharged. So, the current flow changes. And with our semiconductor circuit breaker, which is bidirectional, we can handle also this situation with where the current flow changes. And this one we also indicate on our status LED with a direction of the LED's flow. Okay.

M

Max5:05:23

Now, we have a few minutes left. Maybe I could just come back to you, Joachim. There's a rather interesting project that you're working on right now. Do you want to tell us a bit more?

J

Joachim Seidel5:05:33

Right now, no. Siemens is trusting into what we are developing. That's why we just decided 2 years ago to build up our new production logistics center fully supplied by DC technology. And this is really something to reduce the peak powers by 80%. 80% peak power reduction means you can reduce your transformer at the beginning, and it's much, much more grid-friendly to the grid. And then not so, how can I say, stressing the grid infrastructure time now. This is absolutely necessary as we discussed also before by integration of more and more renewables. You don't have the possibility to cope with huge power peaks. That's why anyhow you have to cut them. And this is easily done by DC technology, which is principally based on a capacitors system. You can easily integrate supercaps or easily integrate, as he stated, batteries to cope with these load profiles. They are coming.

M

Max5:06:42

Now, Joachim, how long have you been here? Since Monday? Did you get here since Monday? You've been here. Yeah. And maybe we could even show the overview of where we can find you. You've been here since Monday. What have you been talking to all the visitors here about so far?

J

Joachim Seidel5:07:04

Well, from my side, I spoke about more than 95% about data centers. DC data center hyperscaler. It's always the same story as I explained before. Huge power demand has to be anyhow handled. That's possible easily with DC technology. Now is the time. We have the semiconductor circuit breaker. We have the bus bars. We have the whole system and now go with it and start with thinking about and implementation.

M

Max5:07:31

And Nico, what about you? You've been here since Monday as well? Also Monday? Also in the same area back there? Yes. What about you? Who of the people been that are talking to you? Are they operators? Are they OEMs? Who are these people?

N

Nico Fritsch5:07:49

There are for sure was a lot of customers there, but also a lot of interest in press. Press. So, there were a lot of interviews because this new DC topic is really interesting as well. And as also Joachim said, for sure you need to explain the whole DC story to understand why we now need this new protection device to handle these grids and to solve also the protection topics.

M

Max5:08:20

Okay. And is it generally hard to convince the visitors that they need to switch now? Or is it after you tell them the story, it's like, 'Oh, yeah. Okay. That makes sense.'?

N

Nico Fritsch5:08:32

I would say it's not hard. When the same numbers Joachim also said, if you highlight them, what are the advantages of DC, then for sure they are, first of all, happy and also convinced about this solution, and they see also that we, when we build our new technology campus, we also trust in these solutions and see that we build up our own facility as well on DC.

J

Joachim Seidel5:08:59

Yeah. Okay. Just let me sum up. 80% peak power reduction, 50% copper reduction, and that's also a habit of DC technology. You don't have any skin effects anymore. This leads to 15% reduced energy losses in your system. We have also built up by our several projects we did in the past, realized in a standard industrial environment, you can save additional 8% on your average power or energy consumption. These are really impressive figures, and my discussions I had, all the customers were pretty lucky about these lots of advantages. Okay.

M

Max5:09:45

And Julia, you arrived earlier today, I believe, and I assume you're going to stay until... No, I'm just here today. Just here today. So, you're going to make the most of customer conversations hopefully later on. What are you looking forward to talking about with them? Anything in particular?

J

Julia5:10:01

Yeah, for me it's interesting who else is interested in DC. So, we see the data center as a huge inquiry. We see the DC industry, which did all the standardization work in past, and now founded a put the foundation for us. And for us it's interesting who else is interested. Yeah, so whenever you are on the Innovation Hub and you see this subtopic, please come to our people. Please talk to them. Give them your insights, because this is also really helpful for us to support you in what you really need. And I mean, for every one of us it should be clear, yeah? We all the most people have now an electric car and every roof we see a PV. So, the transition is always already there on consumer side and on producer side. And now we have to make the change to put all the distribution level on the new era of DC. Okay.

M

Max5:10:51

And I don't know which one of you wants to just briefly explain. So, yes, it's the innovation hub, but what exactly where exactly will we find you? I don't know who is best suited to Nico, do you want to...

N

Nico Fritsch5:11:01

I can do this. So, the innovation hub is on B. And there is also the switchboard from Julia. On C we have showcased all our semiconductor based protection devices and the focus on our DC topic is on B where we can then also show a deep dive of the product itself. Okay.

M

Max5:11:29

Great stuff. Well, thanks again for joining us, Nico, Joachim, and Julia. It's been great speaking with you. Can we have a big round of applause, please, for my three guests? Thank you so much.

And of course, you get something as well from Natura. Our customers in the CPG area about 200 each. Many thanks. Natura who are using our solutions to optimize the way they extract essential oils. So, have fun with that. Thanks again. Enjoy the rest of the fair. Enjoy the rest of the day. Get home safe and see you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And with that, I'm going to hand over to Christine who's looking Max fresh.

C

Christine5:12:10

Max, you've been taking over this sofa, I realized, and there will be even more sessions with you in that main stage here. I've been watching the live stream on gallery stage where we transformed to Erlangen where we had a great event still running as a matter of fact with Roland Busch and the CEO of Adidas Björn Gulden talking about the production of shoes in the future where high-tech meets craftsmanship, what more or less a shoe manufacturing is. So, very interesting. For those who missed it, watch the recording will be online tomorrow, but in German language only. So far. Anyhow, thanks Max for helping and supporting here so much. Big round of applause to my wonderful co-pilot, Max. Awesome. Thank you. Brazil is this year's partner country at Hannover Messe and we're proud that many of those Brazilian customers who are part of the delegation are coming up on stage and talking about their projects, about the implementation of digitalization, about their transformation journey, and about sustainability solutions. And we will now be talking about connecting Brazil's renewable potential to Europe's decarbonization needs. Brazil is a massively big country with lots of energy, of course, but there is a lot of challenges coming along as well, but there is clever, innovative companies finding the right solutions to get those done. This next session will be hosted by my wonderful colleague Isabella. So, let's welcome her on stage with a big round of applause. Isabella, join us on stage here.

I

Isabella5:14:04

It was Brazilian night last night. So, sorry for that. That was a lot of energy, but you know what? You're not the first one where this happened. But tonight will be the cocktail at the Brazilian Pavilion. Please come. Don't worry. That won't happen again. Where is the Brazilian Pavilion? Yeah, that's Hall 12. Okay. And that should be the party 6:00 p.m. 6:00 p.m. You can come everyone get some kind of caipirinhas. But now you will speak about energy transition. Isabella, the stage is yours.

Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here like as you see I fall for a lot of emotion. My name is Isabella Santos. I'm from the GIZ. I'm part of initiative the name is H2UP the international hydrogen program. This initiative is part of the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and energy. Hello Pablo, nice to see you. Since last year we have also a co-financed from the European Union through supported through global gateway. And I would like to call two big persons from the Brazilian Pavilion and also Brazilian delegation and also names that in the energy transition so important for Brazil. I would like to call my colleague Camilo Adlas. Camilo is the director of energy transition from B8. Thank you Camilo for coming. Nice to meet you, too. And now I would also like to call my other colleague. With him I have a wonderful project together. Andre, please. Andre is the director of innovation of Portugal and external producers. Thank you for coming. Please, take a seat. As my colleague the moderator said, we will speak today about energy transition. We have two producers here closer to me, and I'd like to give the space to Andre to explain a little bit what you are doing. Who is – first of all, description of Cocau, the company, what you are doing, and also which kind of project are you doing right now. I know that's once we have a cooperation together, you have a wonderful project with methanol, with Siemens, and I'd like that you can also give an overview of project. Please. Okay.

A

Andre Gustavo5:17:00

Andre. Nice to meet you. Thank you for asking me to be here. It's a pleasure. My name is Andre Gustavo. I am a new business director for Cocau. Cocau is a sugar mill company in Brazil. Actually, we produce sugarcane. In front of this, very good raw material. We produce a lot of other products. Traditionally, we...

A

Andre5:17:22

Used to produce sugar, after that ethanol, and also now we produce bioelectricity, biogas, biomethane, biogenic CO2, and dry yeast as well. So it's a pleasure to be here, have the opportunity to talk and discuss a little bit about the new biofuels to the future. And I enjoy it a lot. Thank you.

I

Isabella5:17:47

Thank you so much, Andre. And Camilo, I'd like you to please give a description of your company BH, and also about your projects. You have a lot of international connection. Please explain a little bit about our...

C

Camilo Adams5:18:02

Thank you, Isabella. It's a pleasure to be here with you, with you, Andre. We have worked together for a long time. I would like also to thank Siemens and colleague Pablo and also Judith Visa. It's incredible what Siemens does here and I have been following since many different Hannover Messe since the launch of Industry 4.0 and it's a pleasure to be here. So I am Camilo Adams. I am energy transition director and the institutional relationships at BH. And our main projects I would say that are related to liquid biofuels. In that range we have a complete portfolio from biodiesel. We have projects for SAF and HVO. We are building a plant for ethanol in the south of Brazil. We also have projects for hydrogen, but our special project here at the Hannover Messe is the BH2 event that was shown together with Mercedes-Benz in a truck that was evaluated here in Germany and President Lula was there with us on Monday and that's what I would like also to present here. Thank you.

I

Isabella5:19:21

Yeah, thank you Camilo. Maybe I should comment that you did it one way to the COP. You drove from south to north of Brazil in the COP, 30,000 km, and here we didn't drive on the road. We went to the test track in Wertheim where we made all the analysis there together with the Daimler testing team. Amazing because I remember on Instagram I saw Camilo Instagram and everyone follows him because it was so nice to see the new technology, the energy transition with transport. That's so important for Brazil. Yes, that's it. Congratulations Camilo.

U

Unknown5:20:06

We are in hall 12, just to go there and see. Thank you.

I

Isabella5:20:12

I would like now to ask Andre. Andre, you have already done some kind of projects right now, especially with Siemens. Did you have some kind of lessons learned that you can share here with the colleagues here?

A

Andre5:20:25

Of course. Well, at the project that we are developing together with Siemens and GIZ is to produce e-methanol from our waste. So the idea is we produce basically sugar from the sugar containing sugar cane and the waste that we are not using here, we are converting this into different kinds of products. So first our ethanol is coming from the sugar that cannot be produced to sugar final product and after that we have the CO2 and also from bagasse we have bioenergy. So this project that we are developing together with Siemens and GIZ team is to use this subproduct that in the past used to be waste, CO2 and bagasse, and convert this into biofuels. So the idea is to produce hydrogen and after that e-methanol and e-SAF. So our idea is to convert the waste from the past to the new biofuels to the future. It's a very nice project because we have a very big scale. So once we get a good result in this pilot project, we can scale it up and send this of course to all countries that need it. Thank you very much.

I

Isabella5:21:47

I need to say I am very curious about all the results that are coming from our project together and I'm so happy about our cooperation with you and Siemens. Thank you, Pablo. And now I would like to... I know that BH is doing a lot of biofuels, sustainable aviation fuels, but also other fuels. How do you think about the movement? Because today I need to explain a little bit for the German ministry about the difference between biofuels and e-fuels. Normally the Brazilians call biofuels everything, that includes e-fuels with green hydrogen. And for Europeans, sometimes they don't understand because we think biofuels you have biomass. But how do you think about the movement that BH is doing right now? How can you explain a little bit about the market and all this movement right now that you are doing?

C

Camilo Adams5:22:57

I believe I can share the answer in two parts. First, considering the European approach or the German approach for advanced fuels or for biofuels are mainly related to the process and Fischer-Tropsch or Haber-Bosch process very well known here. And it's not only this type of process that can make advanced fuels. In Brazil we have more than 50 years of experience since our ethanol program that was started in the '80s. And Copersucar is part of this program in the history and also many other companies. And since 2005, President Lula in his first mandate launched the biodiesel program and we started that. So for us, for BH, for Brazil, biofuel is everything that we can use from waste mass or any type of mass and to be transformed into a fuel that can be used without any type of mineral fossil CO2. So if it is biogenic CO2, if the CO2 is taken from the atmosphere from photosynthesis, and they use that to grow the plants, we can prepare the biofuel. And that's a general overview. The main topic is that there is no taxonomy harmonized worldwide. So some markets go in one direction, other markets go in another direction. But the most important thing is that everybody should have a regional solution, respecting the forest, respecting the food, and then everybody can evaluate together. Thank you very much.

I

Isabella5:24:36

I think that was a really nice message to give to all the colleagues that are here. That biofuels can be sustainable, respecting a lot of the forest and everything. And some of the fuels you are doing from waste, the CO2. The CO2 normally is waste. And that's really nice that the European colleagues here can get this message. Thank you very much, Camilo. But also to this part of the biomass, the CO2 that you have from waste, I'd like to ask you regarding when it comes to speak with European off-takers, we speak about RED III and also the regulation that the fuels can be certified. How can the waste that you normally use in your production of fuels, how can you get the guarantee that you'll be certified?

A

Andre5:25:46

Wonderful. This is actually very important because when we start to do this kind of projects, we need to certify the final products to give a good answer to the environment. Just to give you a small example. Basically, gasoline actually has 85 grams of CO2 per megajoule as emissions. So actually, in Brazil we already have in our ethanol 20 grams, and now we are reaching 15 grams, which is much lower compared to that. How can we measure this? We understand that we need to look from the beginning of the supply chain up to the end of the supply chain. So what we are doing in Copagril to reduce our CO2, and we can guarantee this with certifications, is to try to use our biofuels, especially in sugarcane plantation, transportation, in our industry, and also to send our final product, for example our sugar. 100% of our sugar we are sending from our mills to the port using biomethane as well that we produce. So with this we can reduce a lot of our emissions. What we are doing right now as part of a biogas association that we have in Brazil, we are developing these discussions with our government. So actually we have Segor in Brazil that is an idea to show to the market how we can increase and have a molecule of CH4 and also a green attribute that we can show to our customers and also allow us to do this kind of commercialization. So we believe certification is very important after a good project like this one to try to show to the market the importance of this kind of products. Thank you.

I

Isabella5:27:43

Thank you, Andre. I think it's also important to say that Brazil has around 19% of its energy matrix from renewable energy. That means some regions like northeast and others have a binding zone as you know, so you can be sure that our energy is green. That's really a good synergy together with what you mentioned right now about hydrogen and all the fuels. Thank you very much. And now we will move a little bit from hydrogen to premium fuels. I always heard you in different conferences in Brazil about how BH has a very solid SDGs as you are following sustainability. You are doing a lot of things with your projects and your companies sustainable. But I know also that you are looking to premium fuels, meaning that you are looking right now to bring these premium fuels to Europe. Can you explain for us a little bit about this new market? Or do they already have the market? How can you explain to the public here about this new market? Can you explain?

C

Camilo Adams5:29:14

Thank you for the question. First of all talking about ESG we have a very strong strategy as you already mentioned and it's not only a cooperation strategy. It's related to agriculture, family agriculture. In Brazil there are a lot of farmers that are families, and many times to explain that you have a system you need a system with traceability and for that you need a computer, you need a complete system, you need a satellite. So we go to the families, we teach the families, we make social programs with the families to implement and to educate for that. And that's part of our strategy for Europe also, otherwise we will not be able to certify and to sell here. We are certified by ISCC, we are certified by RFS from US, also from California in the LCFS program and in Brazil for RenovaBio. And for that you need a very strong ESG system. And that's not all, after 21 years of making our own biodiesel now we have the B100 that is a premium biodiesel, a premium fuel as we are showing there. And that can be used 1:1 in any diesel engine for a truck, for a bus, for a equipment for agriculture machine, for an electric generator and you just have to replace. You take out the diesel, you put the B100, we call it functional drop-in, and you achieve the same total cost of ownership, the same durability, the same performance. And that's a technology that is affordable because the costs are nowadays diesel is very expensive, we are even cheaper than the diesel and we can do that with a premium product starting the decarbonization right now.

I

Isabella5:31:14

Wow, nice message. That's already the price. Always the off-takers are asking about the price. If you the price is it's...

U

Unknown5:31:20

The price is a market matter, so we work with commodity in the inbound and with commodity in the outbound. And B100 is part of this reality. So once the season offers us more feedstock and that's important to say that Brazil can make three harvests a year.

I

Isabella5:31:38

Yeah.

U

Unknown5:31:42

Europe makes one harvest a year, so we can make three harvests a year in a very efficient process. And then it's a matter to look to the price of the outbound commodity and then make the accounting. Nowadays, the biodiesel is cheaper than the diesel because of the restrictions in the Middle East.

I

Isabella5:32:01

Super. I think it's now very nice to have you both because you are producing fuels in Brazil and right now you are not in kind of crisis, but something like this. And then if you can export from Brazil, you can get directly. As though in some of the state, if you go to the lead notice, you can speak about nine days, can the shipping go to you? I think that from São Paulo maybe 11 days and that's without problem. Yes. Without, that's really nice because we also in Brazil are facing that the fuels price is going more and more and it's really nice to be here with you both. But right now I would like to speak about Siemens.

Please. And also of all the cooperation that both companies are doing. I know very well the cooperation with Copacabana. I would like to know a little bit more about your cooperation with Siemens. And I'd like because we are right now in Hanover and everyone that we are speaking about fuels they have a huge interest to understand the price. Today in the morning we had with Siemens together with the colleagues a conversation at the Congress Center and we had 18 people. It was full. The people want to discuss. I think my boss was too late for the another meeting, but it was very nice because you see the interest is there. The people want to discuss, they want to understand. Please, can you speak a little bit about your cooperation with Siemens and also the linkage with the European market? Could you please explain a little bit? Please, Andre?

A

Andre5:34:03

Thank you. This is very important because actually what we do, we have raw material, we have sugarcane, we have all of this waste that we can convert. How can we convert this waste into a final product for our customers? We need technology. So Siemens is our technology partner. For example, the last plant that we developed for biomethane production from waste from sugarcane and sectors is 100% Siemens technology. So the idea is how can we connect this? Siemens is the partner that supports all kind of development that we are doing. For example, right now we are studying some ideas to increase the efficiency of the sugar production, which is something very manual, and try to automate this with the Siemens team. So it's so important to have the raw material, the ability to produce, and also you need to have a good technology engineering partner, and Siemens is like this for us.

I

Isabella5:35:16

Yeah. You know, Pablo, you get really good feedback right now from our partner. And now I'd like to hear from you, Camilo.

C

Camilo Adams5:35:28

Isabella, if we were in Brazil on a stage at another type of Congress, I would explain a lot about what we do together with Siemens. But here in this pavilion, I am too modest and too shy because it's just to look for partnership with Siemens. There are many possibilities and it's better to go to the specific experts and discuss that. From our part, from our side, we really believe in the power of Siemens. We are working together for a long time and we were discussing together with Judith Vizi and Pablo. I believe it was yesterday and I'm losing a little bit the time because it's so intensive here. But what are we discussing now? Every time you can improve a process and the biofuel industry is not like the automotive industry from where I came. So when you look for Industry 4.0 for the automotive industry that is so well developed, there are a lot of synergies to bring to the biofuels industry and to the biofuels process. So looking forward, why not use concepts of Industry 4.0 and everything that is coming from now on to go to the process of biofuels and to improve that process to bring those processes also to the same type of technological level?

I

Isabella5:37:00

Yeah, thank you very much. As you see, Siemens is playing a huge role inside of the fuels in Brazil. If you don't know, Brazil is one of the biggest global players and also global producers. And I would like to thank you both to be here to share with me. It's all an honor to be with such amazing partners from Copagril and also from Siemens to see you, Pablo. Thank you very much for the invitation. I think that's what you can take away from here. You should think that Brazil is the country to have cooperation with Europe. You have a lot of players in Brazil that could play a role here in Europe and also contribute a lot to decarbonization because right now everyone wants to decarbonize. They at COP in Berlin you are there. They speak about themselves to decarbonize and as you can see Brazil can play a huge role in the decarbonization of Europe. Please don't forget this. And speaking of all these amazing three companies together with GIZ, the German cooperation agency, we also try to support this energy transition and also to supply companies like you together with German companies to move forward this decarbonization in Brazil but also in Europe. Thank you very much.

M

Moderator5:38:41

Big round of applause to the three of you. Isabella for that shock moment. That definitely is a gift from Natura one of our customers which you know better than we do here in Europe because they come from Brazil. Also for you Andre and Camilo for sure as well. Could we have a photo? Of course you can have a photo. I'm going to move over so the stage is all yours. So put on a big smile and smiling is always a lot easier when there is a big round of applause. And we can do a thumbs up because this is a great partnership and a great cooperation. And thank you also Valdei, Koga for the invitation. Marcia, without yeah, thank you very much. Thank you also. Obrigada. But I always realize when I come to Brazil, you are much further developed with methanol, ethanol and everything where we still are in the beginning.

And we keep the improvisation flexible. Thank you. Thank you so much those companies. Yes, I'm loving it and I'm looking forward to that.

Coming from Brazil all the way to Hanover, we do have a huge showcase here which is the consumer packaged goods area. We have been talking a lot about production processes, but now we will be focusing on the building technology which Siemens also provides. Real facilities and how they can work harder, smarter and cheaper. This is what we'll touch upon in our next session. How to really make a difference, this is what our two experts coming on stage now will tell you about. Please welcome with a big round of applause the head of CPG at Smart Infrastructure at Siemens Sandra Perletti and the marketing manager at Siemens Matthias Bobalni.

S

Sandra Perletti5:40:50

Thanks a lot for being here and listen to us. We would like to go through some aspects of the consumer packaged goods that has not been tackled so far, but can make a real difference. So, we are talking about electrification and infrastructure and how the collaboration with Siemens can have an impact on the final output. So, we would like to start to discuss about which are the challenges in this area. What our customers are really facing and how we can help them to overcome these challenges and also help them in having a better output and a better balance sheet as well.

M

Matthias Bobalni5:41:33

Exactly. Thank you, Sandra. So, first of all, there are a couple of major topics that are currently going around in the CPG industry. One of them is of course the growing population and therefore a production continuity, so a continuous flowing production, in some cases even 24/7, is very, very important. On the second side of that, also a zero harm culture is essential for all of our customers in the CPG area. Secondly, we see a very, very aging infrastructure into the facilities. So, really electrical power distribution systems that are like 20, 25 years old and therefore optimization potential there is still very big and most of the times untapped because there's also no transparency on data in that case. And as a third, we have the energy efficiency. So, a lot of regulations are coming up. We see more and more trend to decarbonization, reduce the energy usage across the different sites and of course the more energy you save, the higher your margin on your product in the end is and the more money you can invest in high quality products. So, maybe Sandra, can you give us some insights on the safety and production continuity topic?

S

Sandra Perletti5:42:44

Yeah, so safety is of utmost importance for every one of us because it's touching the well-being of our workers or our colleagues, of our friends. And this is the first aspect that has to be considered even in this industry. And the second aspect is the food safety and food quality. So, we are all consumers and we all want our product to end well and not to have any issue. And this is something where, for example, us as a company can help quite a lot. And last but not least, an accident can occur in a plant because of external events. Fire is one of the most critical that we are seeing and one of the most common to happen. That has an impact also on the business continuity and on the overall cost because we can see that on average in a consumer packaged good production, it can cost up to 250,000 euros per hour when the production is stopped and when we have an outage. So, you have a heavy impact on the health and safety of the people, you have impact on the food quality, and also you have an impact on the business. But this is where we can act. This is where collaborating with our customers can really see how to improve this aspect. And in fact, I would like to ask Matthias to give us an example where we can be effective.

M

Matthias Bobalni5:44:19

Exactly. So, we had a customer, it was a brewery out of Switzerland coming up to us and saying, 'Look, we have a very traditional but already very old building.' So, Feldschlösschen in Switzerland, they have a brewery where the building itself and the facilities are already 150 years old. So, now they're looking for a modernization on their fire safety systems because that is, as you said, one of the integral parts to keep the production running, to keep also your workers on site safe, and of course, to be able to produce still in these old but very traditional and honestly very beautiful buildings. So, we approached together with the customers, we understood where the challenges come from, and therefore we modernized more than 2,000 fire detectors throughout the entire facility and we were also able to reduce the number of fire control panels from 17 down to five. Therefore, we have shorter ways, we have less cabling, therefore everything is basically centralized. We have a quicker reaction if something happens also for the firefighters in the end. And one of the major topics also for the brew masters in Feldschlösschen was really to keep the production running as well as possible. We did the optimization and the modernization there basically. So, we really enabled or developed a process or a project pipeline that enabled the customer to keep producing as well as possible while we modernized the entire fire safety infrastructure. And maybe Sandra, let's also talk about the second topic which is quite crucial which is on the optimization of the infrastructure itself.

S

Sandra Perletti5:45:57

I think it's a very important topic because it goes from the supply chain to the final output. Which are the challenges that our customers are facing now? First of all, the increase of price for raw material or for energy and the control of cost of the final product. So, we have higher cost, we have the pressure to produce more but spending less. And this is really the major challenge that they are seeing as of today. Then we see regulations that also have an impact and we are seeing that the overall infrastructure of a typical plant is aging. So, we have plants with more than 20-30 years. We need to consider how we can optimize the way they are working to ensure the output required but also to reduce the cost. And here is where we can collaborate pretty closely with our customers to understand specifically their needs and then to act. This is again talking about the power of data. This is important. We need to have the data and we need to do something with the data, something that is actionable. It's not just theory, it's practice. And in fact, I would like to ask Matthias to go through one of the greatest examples that we have of collaboration where we have a real impact and real tangible value on the balance sheet of the customer.

M

Matthias Bobalni5:47:28

For this topic, we picked an example from a dairy company here in Germany, which is the Brandenburger Milchzentrale, quite a tricky name for English native speakers. And they of course, as we said, had an aging infrastructure, especially on the utilities. Therefore, we looked into that together with the customer and we identified their boiler system, which was still at that time running on oil, was of course very outdated and not running to its fullest potential. So, we approached the customer, we approached that problem together. So, we exchanged the existing boiler with a new one, which is a hybrid system on the one hand side with gas and on the other hand side with electricity. While similar to that, simultaneously to that, we integrated also a smart energy and load management system. So, we look into the grid and the energy that is coming out of the grid, also to what price it is available. So, then we can balance the usage of gas and we can also balance the usage of electricity. And also of course looking into that, if you want to expand something like that further, you can also think about integrating renewables on site and using this energy to also fire up your boiler and therefore deliver the process heat for your entire process steps. But it was not only for the purpose of optimizing something. It was also in the end for the purpose of savings and optimization measures. So, therefore in the end with also cutting grid fees, we enabled the Brandenburger Milchzentrale to save up to 300,000 euros per year, and we had a higher than 40% internal rate of return, which is also very, very important for the customers, because also continuous production is kind of the key here. And maybe Sandra, let's come to a third topic that we wanted to present today, which is on the energy efficiency.

S

Sandra Perletti5:49:14

Energy is the topic of today, I think, looking also at what is going around the world. And maybe a lot of people don't know that the entire food system is consuming 30% of the global available energy. And is also responsible for 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions. So, these are high numbers, and this is why EU regulations come in place, and they are asking companies to reduce the 50% of the carbon footprint. So, these are enormous topics, and we can also see that the utilities inside a plant represent more than 50% of their overall cost. So, what do we do? We have expertise, we develop expertise to support our customers in understanding well their process, and then act punctually on something that has a positive impact to them, and help them to continue the production, but again, to save energy, and also to help all of us to live on a better planet. And I think that I would like to ask Matthias to go through the next example, because this is really something that we are proud of. It's a program that we built up with a customer. So, I will let Matthias.

M

Matthias Bobalni5:50:34

Yeah, thank you, Sandra. So, that's one of the projects that we did with our global customers, also across multiple sites. So, we worked very, very closely together with Heineken in that case. So, Heineken had an initiative where they wanted to primarily also decarbonize their facilities across the globe. And of course, decarbonization and energy efficiency go very well hand in hand. And since each and every brewery has a little bit of a system of its own and you cannot copy-paste from one installation to the other, it was a little bit tricky to really understand, okay, where can we start into the different areas? So, we sat together with the customer. We totally tried to deeply understand their processes, which is the most important and main task that they're having, and then creating a system. So, a system that is continuously on the one hand side reusing existing process heat, on the other side also implementing circularity across the utilities like the energy flows and the material flows that we have there. And therefore, we started from factory to factory to enable Heineken to be more sustainable, to brew a more sustainable beer for us, for the consumers, since the demand is rising for that. And so, this is a project which is still rolling and we delivered customer help from advisory services right from the beginning, in the planning, in the implementation, and of course also in the long-run services that are now coming based on that. And well, I just want to say these were only a couple of the examples that we wanted to highlight together with you today. So, if you want to learn more about how the infrastructure is still holding a very, very big potential for the industry for optimization and for modernization purposes, please come visit us on the digital enterprise booth for the consumer packaged goods industry. Thank you, Sandra, for joining me today on stage. It was a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed our presentation and I'm looking forward to meet you on our booth. Thank you all.

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Moderator5:52:44

Thanks to you, Sandra and Matthias. Great insights which you gave here. We've been talking a lot about digital industries topics. So, it's so cool to see that there is much more what Siemens can do and has to offer. And what else I like, tomorrow is the German day of beer. So, the use case you've shown here is just the perfect match to what's happening here. Tomorrow, it's 510 years that there is a law that German beer needs to be brewed with water, malt, hops, and yeast only. And that also is where Siemens comes in with lots of technologies once more. Enjoy your time here at the fair. Lots of customers for sure want to talk to you. That's where they find you in that area over there. So, don't miss that chance to talk to our specialists here, experts in their field. Thanks so much.

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Sandra Perletti5:53:35

Thank you.

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Matthias Bobalni5:53:36

Thank you.

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Moderator5:53:40

Wonderful. And as a matter of fact, if you're interested in autonomous buildings, especially for those who are watching online, there is a session going on right at this time starting it's kicking off on our gallery stage studio. So, the online community, if you want to change channels, Vivian Kuppelmaier, she's also amongst the Siemens smart industry specialist. She is presenting online, spot the channels or watch it on demand. And we are moving on with presentations here on main stage of course as well. Well, coming back to the digital industries topic once more, consumer packaged goods once more also in the focus and will be predicting the future now. Of course, it needs a lot of data as well. That's the key player involved in that field. To be precise, it's data-driven manufacturing at Arca Continental what we will be talking about. Please welcome the three experts coming on stage now. Our host, Rocío Thompson, Dr. Alexander Epple, and Dr. Simon Kempa, who are joining us here now.

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Rocío Thompson5:54:58

Hello everyone. And thank you Alex. Thank you Simon for joining this conversation about Arca Continental and their data-driven manufacturing transformation. And how technology, people, and insights can help organizations to enhance operations. But why don't we watch this clip before we start this conversation?

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Narrator5:55:28

Arca Continental is the second largest Coca-Cola bottling company in Latin America and one of the most important in the world. We operate in the US, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina. As you can imagine, having 45 manufacturing sites around these five different countries also means having different maturities in terms of technology and data management. There are a lot of people to be impacted in terms of the implementation of digital transformation use cases. So, understanding the impact we have on humans that are still part of this loop is pretty important. So, we try to have one excellent center in terms of digital transformation in at least one manufacturing site of each country where we operate. That allows more people to be involved and have a local, geographically located sample, so you can just go and experience what we mean with digital transformation.

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Rocío Thompson5:56:29

Thank you. Excellent. Well, Alex, my first question is for you. Do you remember when we first approached Arca Continental, what were some of the challenges that they were facing at that time?

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Alexander Epple5:56:45

Yes, absolutely. So, it is actually we had a meeting with Arca Continental when their journey started here in Hanover. It was a couple of years ago. And they were actually facing challenges which are very similar to what a lot of manufacturers see. It's the traditional productivity improvements were leveling out. So, they had to actually use new technology to get the slope up again. Another topic was in some areas they were concerned that they were not generating the yield which they wanted. So, higher scrap rates than desirable. And then a very interesting one, very specifically, when they are filling their products like Coke, etc., they track very closely now the cost per case and understand what is actually driving these numbers. And that was also a major challenge for them, having this under control to match this with the rather tight margins which they sometimes get so that they can actually do this as a profitable business.

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Rocío Thompson5:57:52

Interesting. So, when those challenges were clear, do you remember how did they make that decision? Where did they start instead of trying to tackle everything at once?

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Alexander Epple5:58:05

Yes, so very clearly they started with getting basic transparency first. So, they actually know where they have to go to make the changes to also get the reward for that. So, what they did is the main use case for them at the beginning was OEE for getting this transparency. Where is actually the equipment which they have utilized to the best and where is there room for improvement, and in these cases what are the main loss drivers? And then on top of that they already knew at that point that they need to manage their energy cost more closely and so they introduced building on our energy manager solution, energy management system based on ISO 50001. That's the starting point. And as they learn then where are the loss drivers, for example which failure modes cause downtimes, what are the main reasons for scrapping parts of their production, that is then when they were able to go to the next stage and adopt topics like predictive quality or predictive maintenance.

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Rocío Thompson5:59:12

Right. So now Simon, my question is for you. What role did predictive maintenance play at Arca Continental to achieve their goals for digital transformation?

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Simon Kempa5:59:26

Yeah, predictive maintenance is obviously a big buzzword and it's also probably one of the ones that's the hardest to adopt and make successful with the customer. And we always know there are certain key points we look at for a customer to see if it's going to be successful. A key one is cultural maturity support from the shop floor to the top floor. And Arca Continental very much have this in spades. And we very much look for whether they are already on a digital transformation journey because if they're not and their first entry point is predictive maintenance, that's quite a tough ask. If they are not even doing OEE transparency yet, how are you going to measure what predictive maintenance is achieving? So once they had initial success with the transparency use case, we started deploying Senseye predictive maintenance, which is a machine and bearing diagnostic highly scalable predictive maintenance solution, which we deployed with them. And because they had that great strategic framework to deploy this and a lot of buy-in across the organization, you can actually get success fairly quickly. And within 6 days of going live, they saved 13 hours of downtime on a filler labeler machine. You can imagine over 13 hours, that's a lot of Coca-Cola not being produced. So it's not always that quick, but with Arca Continental, because they had that right mindset and strategy across the organization, it's been a really successful to help them along their digital journey.

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Rocío Thompson6:01:09

Excellent. So this question is for both of you. So how does Insight Hub and predictive maintenance work together to achieve operational transparency and predictive insights?

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Simon Kempa6:01:25

Yeah, I'll start. Predictive maintenance never exists in isolation. It's always part of a broader ecosystem of other products, other maintenance workflows, enterprise workflows. And also, often a customer will start with a certain use case, maybe transparency or quality, and then move to predictive maintenance. And for us, Insight Hub provides that backbone. That's where we store all our data, all our context, and we try to align across that to give a single experience to the user. So a bit like Microsoft Office: you can start with Word, that works well, then you move to PowerPoint, and you want the experience to be similar, and you want the data to be interoperable. So that's what I see Insight Hub as being.

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Alexander Epple6:02:19

I think it's already a very good wrap up and what comes on top of it is, of course, if you move into more use cases, you still have the same data foundation and that's an important piece for consistency. Another topic is also if you do this on the same platform setup, it's the integrations which you still have to build with CMMS on one side, MES on another side. You do this once and then it's basically working similarly for all use cases, taking a lot of extra effort out as you expand with adopting new use cases and addressing additional production challenges.

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Rocío Thompson6:02:55

Yeah. Well, now Alex, you've been kind of with Arca since the very beginning in this journey. Do you remember what were some of the early wins that the team made them feel like they were on the right path?

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Alexander Epple6:03:16

Exactly. So when they started, as mentioned, the focus was a lot on transparency, but it doesn't mean that it's just information and nothing tangible comes out. One of the elements was that the cost per case could be managed more effectively and they could reduce the cost position there, which of course directly turns into additional profitability. They were able to increase OEE by three percentage points. If you compare this to the large setup which we saw in the early video, this is actually a significant additional output which you can then sell on the market. And the last step is also that with more knowledge about what is actually causing disruptions, they could also increase the stability of the processes. And now with the adoption of the predictive use cases, we are heading towards this. It's actually a really good journey and we hope that Arca can keep this pace.

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Rocío Thompson6:04:20

Excellent. Well Simon, one of my last questions about people and the partnership between Arca and Siemens, how is the collaboration and how has the investment been a factor of the success?

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Simon Kempa6:04:38

Yeah, and as I hinted earlier, adopting predictive maintenance requires a real cultural shift. We've been doing this now for over 10 years and we have stories that are positive and negative. Normal maintenance workflow is reacting to machines failing and you're extremely busy doing that. At times you probably get quite a rush with being able to fix the machine quickly while the whole production line is down. So you're asking them to adopt a totally different workflow: stop rushing around and use a system that can inform you how to schedule your maintenance activities and minimize that crazy period of reacting to things. Doing that is tough. You need the team to fully support that, from shop floor to top floor. For the first year we work intensively with our Customer Success team to almost be like the customer. We're almost using a system like they use it to help them adopt it, and when they get success, we make sure it's promoted and spurs on further expansion and success. The Arca Continental team has been very receptive. We work very closely in collaboration between our Customer Success team and their engineering team.

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Rocío Thompson6:06:11

Thank you. So looking ahead, what are the plans in the roadmap for Insight Hub and Senseye Predictive Maintenance?

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Alexander Epple6:06:18

Maybe I start quickly. So for us it's three major building blocks. Number one is we get a lot of feedback from customers and that goes directly into product. That is always the most important thing. Number two is contextualization. If we look around over here, there are a lot of different elements going beyond analytics which make up operational software. Analytics only gives the full value if you actually get this contextual information, no matter if it's manufacturing execution, quality management, and you actually augment the data with this to get greater insights. And then the last one, if you look to the innovation hub, what we are doing there already, it's expanding on the AI capabilities which we have with the production co-pilot with generative AI.

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Simon Kempa6:07:08

Yeah, the key thing is to keep being best in class on this. I look at the technology now: you had the first generation stuff which is more condition monitoring from a predictive maintenance perspective. Second generation is the first AI wave, and now you've got the generative AI wave. It's going to be completely transformative over the next few years in what we can achieve and be even more prescriptive with what we give to our customers.

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Rocío Thompson6:07:36

Thank you. This has been a very interesting conversation. Thank you for sharing your perspective on Arca Continental. If you want to learn more about Insight Hub or Senseye Predictive Maintenance, you can come and meet with our team, the experts, and they would be very happy to share with you and do a demonstration. We are in stations 122 and 139.

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Moderator6:08:07

With this, a big round of applause to the three of you. Great insights as always. I would love to know the lucky numbers for some lottery. Yeah. Simon, I'm not sure if I can count you in that and if data and AI are already capable of doing that. Like how often is number seven? How often is number 14 was my lucky number.

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Simon Kempa6:08:32

There's an answer to that, but I don't know it.

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Moderator6:08:35

Yeah. Well, you know what? Let's work on that and present it next year. We're going to earn a lot of money from the lottery companies. Sounds good. Thanks so much.

A

Alexander Epple6:08:42

Thank you. Great insights. Thanks.

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Simon Kempa6:08:44

Thank you.

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Moderator6:08:44

Enjoy the rest of the fair. Thanks for sharing those success stories. Great. And with this, now I am in my wrong system here. I'm sorry, guys. I took the wrong cards. I think it is Fabrizio coming up here, right? And here is the right card. Got a big stamp because that's like three sessions following after each other. So that's quite challenging to keep track of what's first and what's next. All right. We have been talking about the importance of ecosystems and how important it is to have the right partners if you need to find solutions for our customers. One thing is clear: we cannot do it alone anymore. That's also what we are doing with partner companies, and two of them are going to be represented here just in a second. It's FFT Production Systems and Snowflake. Both of them are eagerly working together with us to develop solutions for our customers, and in that case we're going to talk about a practical AI use case where both of them come into play from hype to impact. Let's get more facts now from our three musketeers, eagerly waiting already. Dominik Fink, Martin Goodballet, and Fabrizio Nisi Alcantara. Big round of applause.

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Dominik Fink6:10:09

All right. Hi. Hi, Dominik.

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Martin Goodballet6:10:12

Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

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Fabrizio Nisi Alcantara6:10:14

Thank you so much. Great.

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Moderator6:10:16

Yeah, let's take a seat on the sofa of wisdom. As a matter of fact, this is always the best position. We're looking into the buzz of the fairgrounds and kind of the spectators. But on the other side, there are a lot of people joining us online and also you seem to have a lot of fun here and are interested in what we're going to talk about next. Quick introduction round: we've got Dominik Fink, head of competence center digital factory at FFT Produktionssysteme, coming from Fulda. Then we've got Martin Goodballet, industry principal manufacturing at Snowflake, coming from Lübeck. And we've got Fabrizio Nisi Alcantara.

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Christine6:11:05

Alcantara. You are in charge as the director Siemens accelerator ecosystem at Siemens, coming all the way from Frankfurt. And you would think it's Italy by that name. But there is a lot of Italian passion in there. Okay, now let me kick it off with a question to you, It's all about ecosystems, joint value, go-to-market, and collaboration. Why did Siemens want to establish the accelerator ecosystem?

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Alcantara6:11:37

Yeah, just think about often time to customer I'm asking like, what do a pizza and a digital business parlor room have in common? So, it's all about having the right ingredients. So, what we also doing now with the Siemens accelerator marketplace, which has been launched almost 4 years ago is really having the right partner on this platform. On one side is also really making sure that we promote our Siemens portfolio. But at the same time also having the right partner that potentially can complement our portfolio. On the other side is also having the right partner can actually implement our technology and our customer projects. So it's actually about also accelerating the go-to-market. And the third topic is mostly leading into sale. How can also partners like FFT and Snowflake actually speed up their sales process over time? And this is now possible. So we have been establishing our this new digital sales go-to-market for Siemens which is working pretty well. With a focus specifically on small and medium enterprises because we also said that those customer segments are a bit underserved and we want those to make sure that we also have the right partners. And for me specifically it's a pleasure to have also those two gentlemen here with me today and happy to tell also what we've been doing over the past couple of months and yeah, looking forward.

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Christine6:13:03

What I'm looking forward is Dominic to tell us which special spice you put on the pizza which was making the big difference now. Now, what is this collaboration about and what has been reached so far is for sure a big question for our audience here.

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Dominik Bielau6:13:18

To be honest, it's very special to be after 1 year back on the Hannover Fair once again because when we met 1 year ago, everyone was talking about is it really secured? We had the first connector which is directly connecting all the data to Snowflake without any IoT I call it friend zone because I'm not the IoT layer but I call it friend zone. And for the most of our customer it wasn't trusted. And therefore we had many pitfalls which we had to bring out of the way and I'm also very happy that Snowflake was on our side and also goes to the customer and said, 'Hey, it's secure. It's very easy. You can bring the data right out of the ecosystem, right off the industrial edge natively into the cloud.' And it was also like you said last year at Hannover Fair we announced the partnership between Snowflake and Siemens and we also like talked about what we have in mind. And I always said take complexity out. If it is too complex for large, medium, or small size customers, they won't do it. And we said it's going to be pretty easy, secure, trusted. And if people think around getting data, OT data, fabric data, time series data into us, how do you do that? How do you actually put some magic of that? Is it too complex? And now we have to prove. Yes, you have to prove and what are the next steps of this collaboration? Well, first of all, let's talk about how easy it actually was. We were able to get OT data, operational technology data from machines plus semantic. That means we know it's a temperature sensor. We know it's a torque, right? Contextualized into Snowflake through streaming. That means more or less in real time, with zero complexity, zero additional data engineering, and full governance. For example, if you have a production, we can start right away. You only have to buy an edge device and then you take our FFD data service and the data bridge and then you can select and say, 'Hey, I want this and that data.' And we only click it on and then you have it right away in Snowflake. And of course when we were talking about semantic layer and so on we already have it in the edge device. So the silver layer for all who knows more in Snowflake and the AI cloud they were really impressed what we are doing already on the edge, not the complexity in the transformation stuff like in Snowflake like in the cloud we already have the data in the edge device. As FFT we are a line builder we have the knowledge all about the PLC stuff how to get data out of it how we can transform the data and of course if you need data then let's calculate it.

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Christine6:20:41

Mhm. And what I'd like to add to what Dominic said, it's not only that you can handle millions or billions of data points simultaneously in real time. It's also from a business perspective, the value. We talk about return on investment of these data products in days, in weeks. We have seen a car maker in Europe who was able to produce one day more per shift. Thanks to understanding how the assembly process is in the factory. And if you think of one day more per shift, that's a very big number. You can calculate this in millions. Scalability is a big topic here.

Why now? Is there a clear answer on that how the audience can follow your topics and where can they find you and how can they become part of this journey?

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Alcantara6:21:46

So, we can find both partners on the Siemens Accelerator Marketplace. So, again, they are part of our ecosystem Siemens already for a good amount of time. Now, you also said Christina, it's a bit scalability, right? So, we also need to make sure that we have now ended up this use cases has been successfully deployed in a couple of customers and now we also want to scale to other customers. And that's actually how we want to do it. We also want to generate traffic on the marketplace on the one side and potentially also tap into new customers. Be it small and medium enterprises, it could be also the big enterprises. So, there I think we are also pretty flexible. And ultimately, it's also about go-to-market. So, we want to make sure that we at Siemens work closely together with those gentlemen and try to really understand what's the market potential out there, how to reach and best also to make our end customers happy and also to make our sales people happy.

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Christine6:24:42

Yeah, we've been talking a lot about the CPG industry, food and beverage, everything which is being packed. This is our main focus this year at Hannover Messe, but last year our focus was on pharmaceutical and chemical industry, and we're going to touch upon that later as well. As chemical labs face increasing pressure to deliver faster, more effective results in complex production environments. Accenture, one of our esteemed partners, and Siemens have joined forces to explore the answer: future-ready labs. We say time is of essence, we need to start now. How do you get future-ready? We're going to hear more about this and talk about the role which physical AI and robotics play, and how they plan to scale this innovation. Let's welcome on stage Vivek Kaushik and Rainer Brehm.

Hi Vivek. Hi Rainer. Great having you. The picture says it different, but I think you can match the who's who on the sofa of wisdom here. Going to do a quick introduction round. We got Rainer Brehm, he's the COO of automation business and also the CTO of digital industry. So, you're wearing two hats, Rainer. Which one is bigger, or which one do you like better?

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Rainer Brehm6:26:31

I mean, that use case needs both.

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Christine6:26:35

Okay, that's a clear answer. And we got our partner here from Accenture. Vivek Kaushik, you're the managing director and global head of Siemens business group at Accenture. So, you're fully focusing on the projects we are doing together. 100%. I said that before, you are a steamed partner here on our stage, and it's great that you are putting that importance into your presence here. Rainer, I'm going to start with you. When we talk about the potential for our customers and that they are moving from automated production towards a more adaptive production. How is that done and why is that so important?

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Rainer Brehm6:27:23

Well, you're right and I think in this use case we even go further because we say we want to go from automation to be flexible and adaptive to autonomous. And I think in that use case you're going to show here today we are really already more into the autonomous than even on the flexible and adaptive. And that's really great because that is opening new areas for our customers how they can run their operations. And basically what you need for that is you need to navigate through a very complex environment. You cannot program everything anymore because things might change and maybe it's very hard to program. And that's the reason we say we go from hard-coded tasks into more goal-based automation. So basically we tell the system what to do and the system knows itself how to operate it. And I think this is a principal concept. And we see here a use case where this is already implemented. So it's not only a vision, it gets reality.

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Christine6:28:21

And that's my question to you Vivek in regards of what's the current situation in pharmaceutical and chemical labs and what are concrete benefits which autonomous production brings along?

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Vivek Kaushik6:28:32

Yeah, so thanks Christina and Rainer for having me here. So I'm excited to talk about our autonomous robots offering here. So what is the situation today? The QC and analytical labs are manual and with limited automation. And if you compare them with our supply and factories so supplies and factories have been industrialized a lot while the labs are still dominated by manual work with a lot of data fragmentation and non-scalability. So I believe the labs today are the bottleneck to get the business acceleration. And now how Accenture and Siemens unblock the bottleneck, that's where I'm coming to the benefits. What we are doing for our clients, for example here for BASF, we are bringing joint offerings together. In this case we are creating digital twin and AI training models for the QC or analytical labs. And with that, we are able to create trainings for robots so that they can move autonomously on the material workflow. And the second thing is we are training data models for the robots so they can work as a cobot with the lab engineers to improve their productivity and accuracy. So that's how we create the labs from bottleneck to business accelerators.

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Christine6:29:55

It sounds easy, but I'm pretty sure there is much more to this than just using a bit of data. Rainer, I'm going to ask you. You have a lot of experience in contact with customers. What would you like to add on what we have just stated?

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Rainer Brehm6:30:08

Well, basically I think this is what we also show here on the fair. We say there is automation and we added already since years certain skills to automation and say, you know, grasp it to one thing, but it's only one skill. So now one skill is not good enough to fulfill applications now in a lab. So you need to go from skills even to tasks. How we can automate entire task and I think this is what we see here in a practical use case. And which technologies stand behind all of this? Well, it's very much the simulation and digital twin. It is very much also photorealistic simulation because you need to create data to do it. And then it's really physics AI because these robots need to be controlled and you do this together. So all the technologies we are talking about come to reality in that use case.

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Christine6:31:00

Okay, sounds promising and we already have achieved a lot. Now, Vivek, 1 year ago exactly the Accenture Siemens Business Group was founded with the aim of helping clients reinvent their engineering and manufacturing. What's the concrete role of Accenture and Siemens in this example?

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Vivek Kaushik6:31:24

Yeah, so 1 year back we launched the business group here on this platform and a lot of clients asked us exactly what is the role? Is it just technology and system integration coming together? And then I thought about that a lot and I wanted to bring an analogy and so I compared the partnership like a Formula 1 racing team. The purpose of Formula 1 is to win races. The clients are there to win their digital transformation race. So they need to get ahead of the competition. If you think about that race setup, you have a technology car which is Siemens in this game, but you can't win the race just with technology. You need a data and engineering team which picks up the software and the data and AI to execute and make a strategy to get to the race. That's where Accenture comes into play. We are creating joint offerings and it's not just combining tech and SI, but really creating AI models for specific industry templates. We are creating assets and accelerators with Siemens so that we can get a head start to the clients when they run these projects.

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Christine6:33:02

Rainer, it's not just a vision anymore. It's definitely something you mentioned the BASF topic that your joint pilot customer to bring this to life. Can you explain deeper what was planned?

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Rainer Brehm6:33:14

Yeah, first of all, Accenture I think did a great job because there's a customer need. At BASF, the labs are bottleneck of the entire flow of the factory. If you operate them only with human, they probably operate maybe from Monday to Friday within working hours. But if you want to run a continuous process, labs should work in the night and on the weekend. So how you really come from a bottleneck to support the operation. Going to more autonomous operation is very important. In this case, we really convinced the customer that this makes sense and creates big value. Now with the pilot customer BASF, we go in a 9 months proof of concept to really switch it over. They need to be convinced, but we are very convinced. It runs here in theory and also this morning it runs on the Accenture office on the shop floor. Siemens provides technologies like standard PLC, digital twin, robot task execution, fleet manager C-Move, safety in a shared environment. We are taking the technology stack together with Accenture to that use case with BASF. Based on what I see so far, this is going to be a big impact for the customer.

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Christine6:35:10

Question to you Vivek. Usually when Accenture comes in you're speeding up processes definitely. So, how have you accelerated this project?

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Vivek Kaushik6:35:20

Yeah, so what we try to do is scalable and repeatable solutions. We brought all the AMR with Siemens C-Move technology into our Accenture Munich Lab and we are recreating the whole lab scenario there as if it's a BASF lab. We are creating the digital twin using Siemens Tecnomatix platform and we are creating AI data models specific to chemical industry. With that we are going to create a head start for BASF on how to scale it from one lab to 100 labs. We are basically creating the test scenarios already in Accenture labs using Siemens technology and coming with pre-configured solutions to the clients.

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Christine6:36:07

When you think of the future like sitting us here next year again, how would you say this is no longer a promising concept but a scalable model for the lab of the future? What would you say?

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Vivek Kaushik6:36:34

I'll be having three things here. Number one is we need to unblock the bottleneck and turn the labs from a bottleneck into a business accelerator. Number two, we talked about technology a lot, but we didn't talk about the people. We believe that Accenture people are in the center of AI adoption and scaling. With these projects, we give opportunities for the client workforce to get trained and be future ready. Number three, I would like to see BASF as the leader in the chemical industry to show how you transform your labs into autonomous labs to bring productivity, accuracy, and deliver faster to market.

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Rainer Brehm6:37:41

Well, first of all, I want in 12 months our client to be happy. It needs to be reliable and run 24/7, which is a big task. Then that application is not specific to BASF. It is typical for chemical, pharmaceutical, and all kinds of lab automation. If we make that successful, I expect BASF to scale it at BASF, and we together then scale it beyond our lead customer.

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Christine6:38:15

Times up. There's just one more question to you, Vivek. Where can we find you and Accenture at the fairgrounds?

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Vivek Kaushik6:38:27

We are in Hall 27, right here, everywhere in Siemens. We have a great demo at manufacturing orchestration and innovation hub. And Accenture booth Hall 16.

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Christine6:38:36

Okay, wonderful. And there is also colleagues who will be presenting a deep dive into the lab of the future with our speakers from BASF, Siemens, and Accenture tomorrow at 10:15 again on this main stage. As you mentioned the showcase obviously is something. I have a little something for you. This is produced in Brazil from our customer Natura with Siemens technology. So maybe we look into that process as well. Thank you so much. Big round of applause to the two of you.

Yeah, you can stay here because we move on with great topics. When you think of Vorwerk, what do you think of? I have this tone in my ear. This is when my cooking machine tells me dinner's ready. Vorwerk has changed our lives with vacuum cleaners and the cooking machine, Thermomix. But have you ever thought about how all of this technology is being produced and optimized? Data-driven shop floor optimization in Vorwerk is the focus of our next presentation. I'm happy to announce the three speakers: Dr. Ralf Wagner, Dr. Björn Kruse and Tobias Lange. Welcome on stage.

In the next 10 minutes, we will hear from Vorwerk how they were running their data-driven manufacturing journey and learn about the benefits they created. Vorwerk is a very well-known recognized brand. But, Björn, can you share a little bit and give us an overview about Vorwerk's business and global operations to start with?

B

Björn Kruse6:41:14

Yes, thank you, Ralph and Tobias for the invitation. We are or I am from the company Vorwerk Engineering, Vorwerk Elektrowerke. We are developing and producing premium household appliances like the Thermomix, the vacuum cleaner we can see here in the background. We have production factories in Germany, France, and China. Yes, that is mainly our daily business.

C

Christine6:41:48

So, you operate with major complexity and have a lot of complexity in the manufacturing processes. Prior to our engagement and the journey that you've been on, what were the major challenges that you've seen and wanted to address with digital transformation?

B

Björn Kruse6:42:07

The key issues and topics we have in our production factories, especially in Germany and France, is that we operate highly complex production areas. First is injection molding, motor production, motor assembly, and CD departments, but also final assembly with high complexity of final inspection. The key issues are that these areas must really operate efficiently, productive, and with the highest quality we can achieve.

C

Christine6:42:45

So, that sounds like an impressive journey. But, as we know, it's all about the outcomes. Björn, can you share a little bit maybe about KPIs, business impact, what you actually achieved in this transformation?

B

Björn Kruse6:43:01

Yeah, we also brought some figures. As you can see here on the slide, when we dealt with you as a strong partner in the last 5 years, we were able to establish this IT-OT digital backbone. Currently we are operating with 150 users in four different factories running 12 edge devices from OT to IT layer. We have around 7,500 data points which are caught every 15 seconds. Around 500 machines are currently connected. That leads to OEE improvements of around 3 to 5%, and also to share this information to our customers in the shop floor to have the data visible to all of our customers.

C

Christine6:44:16

Wonderful. I love how you frame it around that digital backbone. I think that's a powerful story. I love what you said also to me beforehand where you talked about the flexibility that you gain from deploying Mendix and industrial edge together. So, how does low-code actually allow you to adapt faster and improve the user experience for the shop floor operators?

B

Björn Kruse6:44:53

The background you see our OT-IT stack and Mendix. We decided to go with Mendix in the area of the edge layer to deploy apps there, but also in the cloud or in Insight Hub. When we deal with shop floor people, we need easy-to-use and easy-to-understand visual experience. This is what we are dealing with to deploy these applications on edge, mostly running on Insight Hub and in the Mendix cloud. We have internal knowledge to build these applications, get the user feedback, and get the requirements from the people because we are driving process improvements. We need to understand the key pain points and how to optimize with a small solution that is highly interconnected with our backbone, with MQTT and REST.

C

Christine6:46:25

Wow, that's very impressive. You came a long way, Björn, in your digital transformation story. So, looking at that, I'm very curious how you see that moving forward. What are the next big opportunities you see where you can leverage the systems, industrial edge, ops center, insights, and Mendix to get to the next level? Is it co-pilot, AI, sustainability, quality?

B

Björn Kruse6:46:53

You're right. We see it here at the fair a lot. We also see it in the slide where I added our ideas, but these are strongly aligned with your products. Now we can gain benefits to apply this and make proof-of-concepts to see the value when we apply anomaly detection, prediction in insight hub, or visual inspection with MVTec. These are all examples we are currently piloting and putting into industry. We currently have three of these cases very close to production. For the data evaluation we already have. So these are our main next steps for the next 6 months to apply use cases that will be an extension of our already running digital backbone.

C

Christine6:48:04

So, with that, I know that you are already combining IoT and MES data, meaning you contextualize ops center and insights hub. We talk about contextualization here at the fair quite a bit. What is the value? Why are you doing it? Why don't you keep the data in silos? Where's the context value for you there?

B

Björn Kruse6:48:27

So you mentioned the two words. On one hand we have the execution side, the work order side, where we need to schedule, plan quantities, deliver products, and catch data regarding serial number and traceability. But also in the IoT world, when we want to be more energy efficient, we gain data when we are not running a work order. So we definitely need both worlds. To have contextualized data regarding the operation and also IIoT data available for anomaly detection or other data that exist but not always in context of an order. So we have several use cases covered with operational context or IIoT context, like energy resource efficiency.

C

Christine6:49:24

That's amazing and I think you touched a lot on the points we also want to address across the fair here. But you talked about data and AI and the backbone and the journey for AI. Maybe before we close, one question that I have is also to Ralf maybe as a starting point: is there a key lesson that you took away from that journey that you personally want to give because there's a lot of things happening in the next three to five years in manufacturing?

R

Ralf Wagner6:50:04

I think Björn and Frederik, what you did is a poster child of a digital transformation journey because you started to build the foundation first. Sometimes we hear very high expectations: 'We want to start with AI and co-pilot.' But you need to build the foundation: connectivity with industrial edge, insight hub, ops center for execution and data analytics. You went step by step, built expertise, and now you are in a position to apply AI on a broader scale. Companies with a similar approach have a way higher success rate in digital transformation and AI adoption than those who rush to a specific use case without a real strategy.

C

Christine6:51:00

And for you?

R

Ralf Wagner6:51:02

For me it would be a quite short answer. I would say it is a good option to search really strong partners on that way and to keep continuous learning. Continuous learning, continuous adoption. I see here at the fair so many new things, but we need to understand and apply them. I see the key fact and key success.

C

Christine6:51:57

So to build on that and if I may also answer that question from my perspective, one key lesson is think big, but start small and fast. That's perfectly what you built out. So before we close, one last thing. Maybe people aren't always as fast as you. Maybe they start where you've been three to five years ago. What kind of advice would you give to them, Björn? What should they do as a beginning?

B

Björn Kruse6:52:15

As a beginning, I also see Olaf here. There was a European project called KICKER for Edge. That would be a big advice because then you really learn a lot and learn use cases that you can apply with different universities and partners in the country. It would be a good advice to step into this world and learn quickly step-by-step.

C

Christine6:52:52

Great shout-out. If you want to know more about what our portfolio can help with, you can visit booth number 138 and 139. Thanks for the time. Thanks Björn for the amazing story and products that you're building with a little bit of our help. Thank you.

Now, up next it's time to talk pharma. This is our big pharma section starting at 4:00. If you've just joined us, welcome to the Siemens booth. Up next, we're going to be talking about next generation therapies. These therapies demand manufacturing that is digital, intelligent, and adaptive. Siemens technologies can accelerate what matters by bringing together AI-driven insights, digital twins, and advanced automation to streamline, scale up, and elevate production performance. All of these are essential for the next generation of life sciences. Please welcome our next speaker, head of life sciences here at Siemens, Maria Gram.

M

Maria Gram6:54:49

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here today. I would like to start by telling you a remarkable story. It's about a little boy called Emil. He's Swedish, like I am, and he loves to play, ride his bike, and play ice hockey. But 3 years ago, all that changed. Emil was diagnosed with anaplastic large cell lymphoma, a rare type of cancer. For Emil and his family, everything became a race against time. Thanks to groundbreaking precision medicine and extraordinary caregivers in Sweden, Emil was able to recover. His mother later stated that precision medicine saved her son's life. Emil is one of the first children in Sweden to have received this kind of special treatment. Why is this story remarkable? Because these treatments aren't yet fully available for everyone, and that needs to change. Innovation needs to move from impressive to impactful at scale. The challenge is no longer in discovery; we can design molecules in silico, simulate them in the body, and perform thousands of virtual experiments. But the system struggles to transfer breakthroughs from lab to patient affordably and reliably. Next generation therapeutics require next generation manufacturing. AI-native therapeutics cannot be scaled by pre-AI manufacturing techniques. Traditional pharma manufacturing doesn't fit with AI-native therapies. In R&D, we see exponential development; in manufacturing, it's still linear, rigid, and slow. We have arrived at an inflection point where exponential technologies like AI collide with linear systems. Incremental improvements won't fix this structural gap. We need to reimagine how therapies are made; otherwise precision medicine remains remarkable but not accessible. Why reimagine manufacturing? Because new therapies don't fit old assumptions: small batch sizes (sometimes one batch per patient), continuous process development, variability as a feature of biology, and continuous learning. Automation alone cannot solve this. We need digital-first manufacturing: design in the virtual world, end-to-end simulation from molecule to facility, and continuous optimization with real-time data feedback. This isn't theory; it's required reality. Would you build a new factory without a digital twin? Digital twins have become decision engines. Take IKEA's kitchen planner: you design, optimize, and test before ordering. Now imagine if that kitchen could validate itself, retrain itself, and adapt for a robotic chef. That's the leap from static planning to dynamic simulation. We are transitioning from fixed systems to flexible, AI-driven ones. High-fidelity digital twins let factories be designed, tested, and validated before construction. AI reduces experiments, guides optimization, and delivers first-time-right outcomes. Together, AI and digital twins form a new operating model—the industrial metaverse. This is a detailed virtual representation of your factory, process, or supply chain, so realistic that software can't tell the difference. It's about making manufacturing as intelligent as the therapies we produce.

C

Cedrik Neike7:03:44

Distinguish between the virtual and the physical environment. Here you can test, validate, and optimize long before you have to make any decisions. That brings clarity and confidence to any complex decision further down the road. Whether it's a kitchen or a bioreactor, you can better understand your needs, plan better, and act faster. When will this happen? Industry leaders in pharma are already doing it. Merck is pioneering reconfigurable modular production environments with a digital background that allows quick adaptation, reduced commissioning time, and resilience that previous generations could only dream of. Johnson & Johnson uses detailed process twins to validate parameters virtually before running them physically, reducing costs, shortening timelines, and accelerating tech transfer. At GSK, we simulated microfluidic processes in vaccine production; digital twins and AI helped us learn from real data for safer, consistent outcomes. Siemens plays a crucial role in life sciences and new therapeutics—not because of single technologies, but because we can connect what has long been fragmented. Our work spans research to development to manufacturing, with continuous digital threads that move information across the entire value chain without losing time or insights. You need data captured with context, kept consistent, and made useful from discovery through full-scale production. This foundation allows digital twin automation of facility systems to work together, helping teams learn faster, predict outcomes, and make informed decisions. Without a good data foundation, AI is useless. At Siemens, we see the future not as a collection of tools, but as an integrated ecosystem that delivers faster scale-up, higher quality, and greater resilience across the therapeutic life cycle. No one can do this alone. We need academia, startups, healthcare systems, and digital platforms connecting discovery, development, and manufacturing. Together we can solve this future for personalized medicine and make it the standard of care, not the exception. We do that for Emil and the millions whose lives depend on what we build next. Thank you.

M

Max7:07:51

Thank you very much, Maria. I'll take that off you. Thank you. And for the next session, I'm going to hand it over to John before Maria runs away. Stay here, you're going to stay with us. Stay where you are. Round of applause for John, who's going to take care of the next session.

J

John7:08:09

Hello, Hanover. It is so good to see you all here. Join us right now, please have a seat. Thank you. We're going to get started here, and I think we're going to have Niels join us online. For all of you streaming, we welcome you. Jerry, Maria, Niels is joining us online. Hello. Let's get this started with introductions. One challenge we hear across life sciences and process industries is generating high volumes of data in R&D but needing to bring it into development, tech transfer, and commercial production. We're at an inflection point for our species—we finally have the platforms, models, and computational power to make that molecule-to-market reality a reality. Joining me on stage, you just heard from Maria Graham, head of life sciences. Next to her is Jerry Kean, group vice president at Siemens Digital Industries. And joining us online, Niels Vandervort, director of digital transformation at Johnson & Johnson. Niels, we'll start with you. From your perspective, share the trends and challenges creating pressure points for change.

N

Niels Vandervort7:10:24

Thanks for the introduction, John. I'll make sure to be live in Hanover next year. For now, the struggle in pharmaceutical companies is real. If you look at trends over the last three to five years, it's a fundamentally different way of working. Three important aspects: First, molecular complexity has grown enormously—molecules are 10 to 20 times more complex than those brought to market around 2020. Second, we're not only doing more complex things but also more things: ADCs, radiotherapies, peptides, oligonucleotides. And we have to do them faster. R&D timelines have drastically reduced—in oncology, phase trials shift earlier; AI helps find trial patients faster, shortening development time by a factor of two or three. Third, competitiveness: we now compete on cost, sustainability, and patient-centric design. We need to do much more complex things in a much shorter timeframe. We can't just be more efficient; we have to completely rethink how we do R&D in pharma.

J

John7:14:24

Niels, thank you. My takeaway is the complexity of molecules and processes, and the condensed timeframe—dual pressure points. Jerry, let's talk about Siemens' investments to address these.

J

Jerry Kean7:14:48

Well said, Niels. John, I'm excited. For 15+ years I've focused on process industry. We've seen digital twins of manufacturing, but a big challenge is technical transfer—bringing R&D and manufacturing together around bill of material, process, and equipment. That costs tens of millions when it fails. Siemens was missing the brilliance of the science. We acquired Dotmatics, number one in scientific tools. They have high-definition tools for scientists, and Luma provides contextualization and AI. Now scientists can accelerate molecule-to-market and shorten drug cycles. A scientist might run 100 experiments; with in silico and multimodality, they start with one that's more likely to succeed. Siemens is investing in digitalization from the lab onward. Maria, your vision?

M

Maria Graham7:17:14

I'm super excited. With the Dotmatics acquisition, we now have an end-to-end portfolio for life sciences that we didn't have before. Siemens now has a great team focusing on life sciences and customer challenges. The time is now—the industry is changing from slow and conservative to dynamic. I feel the momentum. Siemens is ready to partner on these challenges.

J

John7:18:07

The rate of change is tremendous. Jerry, what are you hearing from pharma customers that resonates with our commitment and Niels' points?

J

Jerry Kean7:18:36

In the context of AI, everyone thinks AI will solve every problem. But what we've heard is that data matters—contextualization and structure matter. We're deliberate in investments to ensure scientists get validated, effective data. Without contextualized data, AI gives poor results, which can't happen in this industry. At the end of the day, it's about better patient outcomes. The combination of digital threads and AI should accelerate science from a 10-year cycle to two to three years for next-generation cures.

J

John7:19:47

You're talking about contextualization and digitalizing the entire journey. Niels, does that resonate at Johnson & Johnson?

N

Niels Vandervort7:20:11

Capturing data is one thing; we have data lakes. The challenge is capturing the what and why—the development narrative. That's not captured in ELN, MES, or control systems. If we can do that, it opens up AI and, more importantly, enables learning. Today knowledge is tribal. If we capture the development narrative, we can institutionalize learning, which will be a key differentiator.

J

John7:21:11

Thank you, Niels. Quick final question: what's the key to making digital transformation easy for scientists so it accelerates innovation? Start with Niels.

N

Niels Vandervort7:21:35

It should be integrated in the workflow—not additional work.

J

John7:21:40

Fantastic. Jerry?

J

Jerry Kean7:21:42

People, process, and technology.

J

John7:21:44

People, process, and technology. That's it? No, I could keep going but you said 30 seconds. All right, Maria?

M

Maria Graham7:21:53

Get the data in order—that will solve your problems. People, process, and technology.

J

John7:22:02

There we go. Niels, thank you for joining us online. The takeaway: molecule to market. Siemens is answering the call to improve patient results. Thank you Jerry Keen, Maria Graham, and Niels van der Voort. Enjoy the rest of Hannover.

M

Max7:22:48

Wow, thank you so much. We have something from Natura—some soap. Thank you. Is this telling me something? I'm not saying anything. Thank you, enjoy the rest of the fair. John is like Christine, a bundle of energy. No one's going to match that.

Up next, we'll hear about a project that was an initial pilot to evaluate digital twin technology in greenfield planning. It enabled identification of key aspects like production flow, cycle time optimization, improvements in procedures, and mitigation of ergonomic issues—delivering impactful value and potential to accelerate commissioning and qualification by up to 30%. Please welcome Rodrigo Alvarez, Head of Vertical Life Sciences Brazil, and Felipe Rodriguez, Project Manager at Bio-Manguinhos.

R

Rodrigo Alvarez7:24:22

We are glad to share the Bio-Manguinhos use case. Rio de Janeiro is not only for tourism but also a pharmaceutical hub. Bio-Manguinhos is part of Fiocruz, a biomedical research institute under the Ministry of Health for over 100 years, supplying vaccines and medicines to the public health system. Founded in 1976, it produces biopharmaceuticals, diagnostic kits, and vaccines with about 2,000 employees. During the pandemic, they delivered around 3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine with AstraZeneca. Since 2017, over 1 billion doses of vaccines, including yellow fever, have been delivered. They export to Latin America and Africa. Now they're building a greenfield project called CIBS to scale production, which will be the most important biopharmaceutical complex in Latin America. Currently in design phase. I'll hand over to Felipe.

F

Felipe Rodriguez7:27:50

Thank you, Rodrigo. I'm Filipe from Brazil, working with vaccine production. I'll talk about our digitalization master plan for CIBS, virtual simulations using Siemens tools, and our digital twin journey. We built a digitalization master plan with Deloitte, identifying virtual simulations as a starting point. We constructed virtual models of two production lines: a filling line and a packing line. Using Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation, we ran simulations based on project data and created a digital twin roadmap. First step: Biomanguinhos and Deloitte developed the master plan. Second step: we built high-fidelity virtual models with Siemens, Deloitte, AWS, and NVIDIA. We plan to connect these models to the shop floor. Manufacturing simulations helped us study scenarios to improve processes and productivity. We built model CIBS lines to understand processes, experiment with production scenarios, and anticipate pre-operation and validation. Results: 250% reduction in operator travel through material repositioning, 70% potential increase in daily production with only two shifts, optimization of operator numbers, validation of buffer and magazine capacity, and identification of bottlenecks. Human simulations using Tecnomatix Process Simulate Human helped avoid ergonomic issues, evaluate operator fit, train staff before the plant was built, and develop accurate operating procedures. CFD simulations with Simcenter CCM validated critical systems in freeze-drying, understanding equipment behavior in the new plant, evaluating variable scenarios like leaks, and optimizing process parameters. These simulations helped answer many questions. In conclusion, we are in the short term with proof of concept; we will implement these tools and use the virtual models for operation of the new CIBS plant. We are at level two of the digital twin journey; the next step is level three: connecting data from machines to the virtual models.

R

Rodrigo Alvarez7:37:27

Thank you so much. We are very proud that Siemens was chosen as the technological partner for Biomanguinhos' digital twin journey. Thank you, Filipe.

M

Max7:37:48

Thank you very much. You also get something from your Brazilian colleagues at Natura—a bar of soap. Thanks for coming to Hanover. Enjoy the rest of the fair. Round of applause for our guests.

I just have to grab my notes. Continuing with our partner sessions, we're talking about ZETA. We'll find out how Körber Plant Engineering accelerates data exchange using the asset administration shell. Please welcome Martin Meyer, director of business line digital solutions at ZETA, and Sigmund Brauer, head of competence center integrated engineering at Siemens.

M

Martin Meyer7:39:08

I flew in from Copenhagen, so it was fine.

M

Max7:39:31

Great to have you here. First, key terms: ZETA Group is a global partner for biotech and pharma, designing and delivering biopharmaceutical facilities. They help reduce complexity and shorten timelines up to 50%. COMOS is Siemens' plant engineering platform for designing and managing process plants across the life cycle—a single source of truth. Asset administration shell is an industry standard for data exchange. Siggy, over to you.

S

Sigmund Brauer7:41:22

Thank you, Max, and thank you, Martin. We're talking about enhancing efficiency in plant engineering with COMOS and the administration shell. A key challenge: engineers must decide which equipment meets functional requirements. In large projects with over 100,000 tagged items, getting information from PDFs and translating it into multiple engineering systems is inefficient.

M

Max7:42:57

You've explained the challenges well. Martin, your experience?

M

Martin Meyer7:43:08

We started collaborating in COMOS, then introduced workflows. But we realized we need libraries so colleagues can drag and drop valves. We have over 50,000 component types from 100+ suppliers, each described by 50-100 properties, currently managed in Excel and PDFs—not the future. We need to contribute to standardizing this process.

S

Sigmund Brauer7:44:45

We'll solve this with the asset administration shell, the digital twin. Sub-models like digital nameplate, technical data, carbon footprint, and document handover are standardized. We developed an ecosystem connected to AAS servers of manufacturers, crawling data and making it available to engineering systems like Teamcenter and COMOS. The magic will be convincing suppliers to adopt AAS.

M

Max7:46:47

How far are we in reality?

S

Sigmund Brauer7:46:56

We'll release our first version for COMOS this summer. I'll show the end-to-end use case. In COMOS, from a P&ID, you can search for a supplier directly, get an asset list with sub-model data, download the right device into the instance library, and synchronize it. This streamlines the process from functional requirement to purchasing. Time savings of about 60% are possible, with enhanced data quality.

M

Martin Meyer7:49:00

We've tested this. It's beyond 50% time saving on administration. We currently have five full-time equivalents just maintaining component data—that effort should be redirected.

M

Max7:51:37

Siggy, any news?

S

Sigmund Brauer7:51:43

We've aligned with engineering partners across Europe to define a standard subset of 50-60 parameters for components, ensuring suppliers know what data we need. This initiative started in January, and competitors are contributing.

M

Max7:53:01

Where can the audience find you? At the COMOS booth 148 and Teamcenter station 163. Thank you, Martin and Siggy. Round of applause. Now, moving to OT cybersecurity in pharma. Please welcome Volker Boost, Chief Security Officer at Merck Group, and Sander Odmansson, Head of Business Line Cybersecurity Software for OT from Siemens.

V

Volker Boost7:55:56

I think 90% of people here use Merck products—our liquid crystals are in every smartphone display. Merck is a leading science and technology company with healthcare, life science, and electronics sectors.

S

Sander Odmansson7:55:23

I'm still fine, actually. My feet hurt up to the knees now.

M

Max7:55:28

Volker, how about you? Used to relax? Everything fine?

V

Volker Boost7:55:32

No, it's my first time. I only arrived for the talk today.

M

Max7:55:37

Perfect, thank you for making the effort.

U

Unknown7:56:22

Did you know that? No, I did not know it was part of my smartphone. That was aha moment.

C

Christine7:56:28

Everyone was like, 'Ooh.' Never too old to learn something new. Yeah, exactly. Now, Volker, in your role, you cover security and information security for the entire group, right? Worldwide. So, for IT and for OT, can you tell us how different IT and OT actually are in reality?

V

Volker7:56:49

It is totally different. In IT, we always talk about integrity, availability, confidentiality. In OT, it is only about availability. When the floor stands still, that is painful for the company. Our colleagues' expectations are totally different. As a cybersecurity unit, it is much harder to get a complete overview over the whole environment.

C

Christine7:57:30

Okay. And Sander, from your perspective, IT versus OT, where is the difference?

S

Sander7:57:34

You already caught a lot. It is very difficult to get real transparency on your shop floor because you might have other vendors. Updating is difficult. At Siemens, we get browser update pop-ups, but you cannot do that with a SCADA system while producing expensive material. That must be done differently.

C

Christine7:58:10

Building on that, which areas of cybersecurity require truly different solutions for OT?

S

Sander7:58:22

Transparency is key. On a PC you install an agent; on a PLC you cannot. OT has long-life products — devices 20 or 30 years old, sometimes running Windows 95 or XP. You cannot scan or install software on them. You need to segment, put unsecured topics behind firewalls, and assess vulnerabilities differently. It requires intelligent people and a lot of information.

C

Christine7:59:43

Volker, where do you currently stand at Merck on these topics?

V

Volker7:59:49

We have a stable environment with a good overview, but it is behind. We need to focus on the vulnerable machines. We are implementing a scan module so our security operations center can see into the OT environment. We are present in 65 countries, so getting an overview is challenging. We are also driving smart manufacturing, which changes the IT-OT convergence.

C

Christine8:01:23

Sander, you are a big promoter of OT cybersecurity. How can you help make Merck's journey easier and more automated?

S

Sander8:01:51

We have products like Industrial Asset Hub, a cloud-based solution that brings asset information together. We have Synack Security Inspector for in-depth network scans, and Synack Security Guard that matches assets with vulnerabilities from all vendors. We can help mitigate vulnerabilities without updating, using business-exposure-based risk recalculation. Synack Security Monitor provides 24/7 threat detection, proven in our own factories for over 10 years.

C

Christine8:03:49

Yes, it is not just protecting, but also scanning. As you said, you cannot protect what you do not know. Traceability is very important.

Volker, one piece of advice for organizations starting their OT security journey?

V

Volker8:04:18

Do not be scared of sleepless nights. The first step is getting an overview of what is running in the OT environment. In a global company undergoing digitalization, you must focus on the right thing at the right time. That is impactful.

C

Christine8:05:06

Sander, what advice do you have so the audience has no sleepless nights?

S

Sander8:05:10

Buy our products, or listen to the next talk. But also, we lack the right people. Our service portfolio, including a SOC, can help you monitor plants so you can start today. The time to act is now.

C

Christine8:06:01

Sander, where can people learn more and talk with you?

S

Sander8:06:09

Come to our station, number 131, for a live demo of Synack Security Guard and a free 3-month trial.

C

Christine8:06:28

Perfect. Sander, you have been here for days. What have visitors been most interested in regarding OT cybersecurity?

S

Sander8:06:42

The shift is from 'we need to do something' to 'we have to do something.' We talk about helping with regulatory requirements like NIST 2 and CRA, and how easy it is to start.

C

Christine8:07:10

Yeah.

Volker, for the rest of the day, what conversations do you hope to have? Any key message?

V

Volker8:07:22

I hope to find an end-to-end solution. It is challenging, and I will discuss with Sander.

C

Christine8:07:42

Great. Thank you both. Grab them while you can. A big round of applause for Volker and Sander. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Max.

M

Max8:07:56

Folker, thank you. Sander, thank you. And Folker, you are getting a goodie bag. Sina, let's bring it.

C

Christine8:08:04

This is from our customer Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics company using our digital twin. And Sander, it is my favorite color. You are all crazy. You will get something on the way. Christina or Sina will hand it over. Thank you.

We will continue talking about cybersecurity. Industrial environments are becoming more connected, and cybersecurity is a business imperative. Regulations like CRA and NIS2 raise expectations. How can companies protect production and stay compliant? Please welcome Michael Metzler.

M

Michael Metzler8:09:35

Cybersecurity is your license to operate. Due to connected devices and digitalization, attack vectors increase. If attacked, production goes down. Average downtime is 24 days. 75% of companies have been attacked. Cyber attacks happen to everyone, even a small dairy farm. The European Parliament has two regulations: Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) for products with digital elements, due in 2027, and NIS2 for companies over 50 employees and 10M turnover. Requirements: risk management, corporate accountability, reporting, and business continuity. Siemens has 1,300 cybersecurity experts and offers vulnerability management, network segmentation, security monitoring, and SOC services to help you navigate these challenges. Secure your license to operate.

Thank you and stay secure.

C

Christine8:20:59

Thank you, Michael. Safe and sound. You are leaving the stage already. I would have had plenty of questions.

M

Michael Metzler8:21:07

Here for you.

C

Christine8:21:09

He is rushing off. If you have questions, ask the experts. As our Chief Cybersecurity Officer says, it is not a matter of if, but when you will be hacked. We have the right solutions.

Right solutions is also a cue for our last session. We will talk about digital transformation for Indian industries. Please welcome Karam Singh and Vikas Sharma.

Hi, Karam. Hi. Join us on the sofa of wisdom. Make yourself comfortable.

How have things been at the fair?

K

Karam8:23:01

It has been really nice, very enlightening. I have seen so many amazing technologies that I can implement.

C

Christine8:23:17

Wonderful. First time at Hannover Messe. Let us do introductions. Karam, tell us about yourself and your company.

K

Karam8:23:43

I am Karamjit Singh from Karam Machine Tools Private Limited in Rajasthan, India. We produce stone processing machinery for marble and granite, using high precision. We serve both domestic and global markets.

C

Christine8:24:37

Wonderful. Marble and granite are famous. Vikas, what is your company?

V

Vikas8:24:50

I am Vikas Sharma from Godavari Biorefineries Limited. We produce sugar, ethanol, bio-based chemicals, and power generation. Starting from sugarcane from the farm, we crush it to produce sugar, molasses, juice, ethanol, and then chemicals. Byproducts like bagasse are used for fertilizers. It is a cycle giving back to nature.

C

Christine8:25:39

Nice. Sugar is always good. Vikas, you operate in an integrated, multi-product complex. What changed that made fragmented visibility unacceptable and forced a digital rethink?

V

Vikas8:26:05

We are a 50-year-old company. We started digital transformation to align all systems and create a data hub for analytics. It is not just about data, but real use for better production.

C

Christine8:26:56

Karam, you were not improving an existing machine but beating global benchmarks. What convinced you traditional approaches would not work?

K

Karam8:27:20

Our vision required precise tools and complex technology. We built a machine that cuts stone with a 0.5mm wire, 30 km long, running at 30 m/s. It is fragile and needs precise control. We collaborated with Siemens to build it from the base.

C

Christine8:28:32

Amazing. How did your digital-first approach change engineering, validation, and scaling?

K

Karam8:28:59

Years ago, it was not possible. Now we use 11 highly synchronized servo motors. The wire is fragile but cuts marble fast. You cannot use traditional technology; you must use the best tools available.

C

Christine8:29:45

Great. Vikas, after creating a single secure view across IT and OT, what changed most? Was it technology or how people made decisions?

V

Vikas8:30:10

Technology is one part. The real change is how people use it. From workers to management, everyone uses analytics for better decision-making, giving us a competitive edge.

C

Christine8:31:05

Looking at impact, where was the biggest — efficiency, sustainability, compliance, or resilience?

V

Vikas8:31:20

The biggest was breaking silos and making OT and IT speak. We combined everything on one platform. This gave us a technological edge.

C

Christine8:32:17

Karam, how did that digital foundation translate into customer confidence, especially against imported machines?

K

Karam8:32:35

Customer satisfaction is key. First, using Siemens products gives reputation. Second, we made a simple system easy for low-scale operators. Third, we keep improving; this exhibition gives me ideas.

C

Christine8:33:56

Karam, what does your journey say about the future of Indian engineering and manufacturing?

K

Karam8:34:14

Young entrepreneurs are staying in India and moving from traditional to adaptive technologies. This shows steady growth, and soon we will compete globally.

C

Christine8:34:56

Vikas, with your data foundation, how prepared are you for AI-driven optimization and predictive operations?

V

Vikas8:35:18

We have achieved the data layer and are identifying KPIs and bottlenecks. We plan to use digital twins, predictive maintenance, and advanced process optimization.

C

Christine8:35:56

What differentiates Siemens in your transformation journey compared to other partners?

V

Vikas8:36:15

Siemens has deep domain expertise and the right technology. They listen to the problem and develop a product if needed. It is a true partnership.

C

Christine8:36:50

Karam?

K

Karam8:36:58

Other competitors have technology, but Siemens stands out with service. The team worked like a family during development and provides excellent after-sales support. That is why I am here.

C

Christine8:38:17

Thank you. Now Ram is joining us.

R

Ram8:38:40

Thank you, Christine. We are concluding with a rock-solid moment. We started an initiative called Tech Champs to recognize people behind implementations. Today we celebrate Karam and Vikas as Tech Champs.

C

Christine8:39:56

Great. Let us invite Swapnil to hand over trophies.

S

Swapnil8:40:08

Congratulations.

C

Christine8:40:21

Big applause. And the team from PLM Indiatech.

R

Ram8:42:03

This is incredible. We will continue to celebrate successes.

C

Christine8:42:57

I hope you had a great day at Hannover Messe. Lots of innovation. Izzy and Max are at the booth. Handing over.

M

Max8:44:03

Yes, Izzy, what is your highlight today?

I

Izzy8:44:22

Going to the Natura booth and smelling the Amazon rainforest with VR and essential oils.

M

Max8:44:36

I must try that. Looking forward to tomorrow? The party, I think.

I

Izzy8:44:52

The party, I think, will be the highlight.

M

Max8:44:59

Great. Tomorrow we have partners and customers on stage, including Pringles. We had a Pringles crunch time challenge. Izzy, want some Pringles?

I

Izzy8:46:27

Yes.

M

Max8:46:31

Thank you. See you tomorrow.

C

Christine8:46:42

Thanks to Max and Izzy. A big thank you for following us. See you back tomorrow at 9:15.

Siemens | Live from Hannover Messe 2026

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