Factory-X and the realization of use cases in the data ecosystem

In today’s episode, everything revolves around the realization of use cases – specifically through the integration and utilization of existing standards. This requires strong partnerships and initiatives that drive the industry forward together. Therefore, I want to use this episode to introduce you to the Factory-X project from a practical perspective, explain the concept behind it, and show you the benefits it offers.

Today, I welcome Bastian Brinkmann, Head of Corporate Future Lab and Sustainability Management at the Uhlmann Group, whose core business is mechanical engineering. Also joining us is Dr. Sebastian Heger from our IoT partner soffico, whose focus is mainly on software. Together, we will talk about the technological advancement of Factory-X, what it actually is, and how companies like Uhlmann are adapting their business models to the digital age. We will also look at how standards and collaborations can strengthen medium-sized businesses.
All other information, as always, can be found on our website iotusecase.com. And with that, I would say, let’s get started with the episode. Let’s go!

For all those hearing about Factory-X for the first time, I’d like to give a brief overview. Factory-X is a funding and research project within the context of the Platform Industry 4.0, currently driven forward with 47 partners, including leading companies, research institutions, and associations. Platform Industry 4.0 is an initiative operated in close cooperation with the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. It was launched as part of the German government’s High-Tech Strategy 2020 and aims to strengthen leading production sites in global competition. The platform originated in 2013 from an initiative by the associations Bitkom, VDMA, and ZVEI and was officially presented at the Hannover Messe.

Factory-X is closely linked to the larger Manufacturing-X initiative, with both aiming to promote digitalization and networking in the industry. It’s important to understand that Manufacturing-X is the overarching initiative aimed at creating a cross-sector digital ecosystem for the entire manufacturing industry. Factory-X is a specific flagship project within this initiative, focusing primarily on mechanical and plant engineering as well as related use cases. The goal is to establish a robust IT and software foundation and to develop the so-called Factory-X Kernel. We’ll learn exactly what that is in this episode.

Hello Sebastian, hello Bastian, welcome to the IoT Use Case Podcast. Great to have you here. Sebastian, how are you doing? Where are you currently located?

Sebastian

Hello Madeleine, hello Bastian, hello listeners. I am in the beautiful city of Augsburg, here in the south of Bavaria, enjoying pleasant weather. I’m feeling positively tense since this is my very first podcast.

That’s good. I’m also looking forward to it. Can you briefly tell us who you are and what you do?

Sebastian

I am a Product Manager at soffico and, together with my colleague, responsible for the development of our software solution Orchestra, a data integration platform that enables companies to connect IT systems and machines.

Very nice. We’ll delve deeper into what exactly that is and how it works in a moment. Bastian, where are you currently located?

Bastian

I’m currently in the lovely city of Ulm. Originally, I work for Uhlmann, based south of Ulm in the town of Laupheim, but I now live in Ulm and work from my home office.

Great. Can you briefly explain what you do at Uhlmann?

Bastian

I oversee two central areas at the Uhlmann Group. First, the Corporate Future Lab, a central innovation unit dealing with the major future topics of the Uhlmann Group, in connection with which we also collaborate with Sebastian and his team. Second, I lead Corporate Sustainability Management.

Very nice. Today, we’re talking about Factory-X. We will also talk about Uhlmann in a bit. Could you perhaps briefly explain how you two came together? Is there a shared history between soffico and Uhlmann?

Bastian

Yes, there is a history. Uhlmann has been intensively involved for several years in expanding the digital business alongside the machine business, which we will discuss shortly. We realized that not all technologies needed to be data-capable could be developed by us as machine builders. That’s why we’ve been working closely with soffico for some time. This ultimately led us to join the Factory-X project together and drive forward additional use cases.

Could you briefly explain to the listeners what exactly Factory-X is? What is the goal of this project?

Bastian

Factory-X is a large consortium project that started in February this year with a total of 47 partners. It is a lighthouse project within the Manufacturing-X Initiative, an initiative funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection. The goal is to design data spaces and data ecosystems for the industry, especially for factory equipment manufacturers, plant engineers, component suppliers, and their supply chains.

I will link some further information on this topic in the show notes. We will also explain in more detail what it’s all about. To clarify: you have two roles. On the one hand, you are partners in implementing specific use cases at the Uhlmann Group, and on the other hand, you are both partners in the Factory-X project. Is that correct?

Sebastian

Exactly, that’s a good way to summarize it.

Perfect. It might make sense to dive a bit deeper. Bastian, can you briefly explain what projects you are currently carrying out at the Uhlmann Group? Are these related to manufacturing or IoT and digitization?

Bastian

Maybe I should first explain the Uhlmann Group. We are packaging machine manufacturers, and a large part of our largest subsidiary’s customers operates in the pharmaceutical sector. Other subsidiaries have customers in the healthcare, consumer, and similar industries. Packaging machines mean that we provide solutions for production environments, whether for medicines, contact lenses, razors, batteries, and other products. In the late stages of production, our machines, usually highly automated, take over the packaging of these products. The focus is increasingly on integrating these production facilities into the smart shop floor. Our goal is to offer smart functions and added value for our machines to our customers while also opening up the perspective of integrating future shop floor management systems, energy management systems, or similar into this smart shop floor and contributing our services.

I see. Sebastian, what is soffico’s role in this context? Do you help with IT/OT integration with your product?

Sebastian

Our product, the Orchestra data integration platform, solves many of the problems that Uhlmann still has today. We are talking about the time before Factory-X, where we encounter a very heterogeneous world with heterogeneous interfaces, data formats, and data mappings. Data needs to be transformed when integrating systems in the shop floor, whether for horizontal or vertical integration. Orchestra is the tool of choice here. Orchestra is essentially a development environment. You can perform data integration on a low-code basis, both graphically and with code. This means you can configure interfaces graphically, conduct data mapping, and implement data integration without significant development effort. In the next step, you can roll out these communication scenarios to a runtime environment and monitor how they perform in operation. Uhlmann uses exactly this tool to establish the interfaces between their systems and their customers’ systems.

Bastian, to better understand your use cases: You just talked about your own shop floor, meaning the machines and equipment at your facility, but the packaging machines are also located at the customer’s site. What are typical use cases you implement there? Are they classic topics like traceability or condition monitoring? What exactly do you do in manufacturing?

Bastian

Exactly, those are the main use cases. We are now connecting the machines we build ourselves, but the primary focus is on establishing connectivity in our customers’ production environments. A significant part of the requirements comes from pharmaceutical regulations and production guidelines that we must adhere to. This means we have high demands on process monitoring and documentation of production processes. For example, traceability in drug production, i.e., traceability according to pharmaceutical regulations, is a central issue. It has been established for decades that individual packages must be traceable, and we have to implement such solutions.

So, you have an established core business and are now developing new use cases in the area of connectivity. Can you outline the vision for your customers in the area of IoT and digitization?

Bastian

Our customers already operate in highly modern production environments today. Otherwise, adequate pharmaceutical production would not be possible. In these environments, there are very high demands for future smart production. The goal is to maintain high quality while countering the increasing shortage of skilled workers. This should be achieved through increasing automation, more guidance, and additional services that we integrate into these systems and which already exist in the factory. Ultimately, it’s about managing the entire factory, not just keeping individual machines running but optimizing the entire production network to be as efficient and sustainable as possible.

Okay, so the main use case or challenge is connectivity. I think that’s also the topic surrounding Factory-X, which we will now discuss, where it’s about ensuring data connectivity for your machines. Is that your focus?

Bastian

We say it’s an absolute foundation. Without ensuring data availability and the technical basis of connectivity, we can’t realize many of the added values. However, it’s not just about networking machines in the shop floor. At Factory-X, we also say that it’s not enough to provide data only within the customer’s environment. It’s about making the data available in an ecosystem beyond company boundaries and enabling services like those from Uhlmann that don’t run on-premise at the producer.

You just mentioned the backgrounds and the challenges associated with them. Can we delve deeper into the ‘why’? Why is the Factory-X project necessary? It’s also about data spaces and creating an ecosystem. Can you explain what the main idea is, why Factory-X is necessary as a project and what the business case is, perhaps also in terms of the business challenges for your customers and everyone involved in the consortium?

Bastian

What we’ve realized in our own little world is that it’s not enough for Uhlmann alone to develop technical capabilities in data or digital products. For example, our customer requires monitoring of the entire line, which does not consist solely of Uhlmann machines. This means we are just one small element within the overall system, whether in production, where we provide only a part of the equipment and the associated data, or in industry networks and value chains, where we are also just one of many players. We can’t expect the solutions and standards we develop on our own to be adopted across the board. We’ve tried that long enough, but our digital business hasn’t scaled as we had hoped. That’s why our efforts in the Factory-X project and our collaboration with soffico are aimed at creating data availability based on scalable standards that can be used throughout the supply chain and factories worldwide. This provides the crucial connectivity foundation on which we can build.

Okay, so it’s ultimately about developing a standard or technological foundation that is uniform. Perhaps one provocative question: How is it done today? Often, much of it is manual, like with Excel. Can you talk about how companies do it today and how much time and money they lose?

Bastian

Practically speaking, the traditional approach was initially a cash cow because we sold the necessary connectivity as a custom project, often through pure hardware and manual wiring. This means we manually connected hardware to a software system, be it a SCADA system or other Level 4 systems, and established the functionality. Excel hasn’t played a role for a long time, but these are often custom connectors in non-scalable and non-maintainable environments.
That’s where we come in: This approach is neither scalable nor maintainable and is no longer tolerated by customers. Customers no longer expect that custom connectivity will be provided for every use case by every vendor. This is where you come into play, Sebastian.

Sebastian

We’ve improved significantly in recent years and decades. The phenomenon of printing something out, scanning it elsewhere, and storing the PDF, which is a kind of interface in a broader sense, is generally only seen in administration today. Orchestra and other competitor solutions have already laid the foundation and shown that we can implement many things much faster internally within companies and in individual projects. However, the world we are now aiming for is to be even more standardized, with much higher reusability and, therefore, better scalability. The goal is to develop an interface that can be reused hundreds or thousands of times. Within companies, we are already very well positioned: developing a shop floor connection and rolling it out to 50 plants worldwide is no problem for us. The next step is to do this across companies and industries to achieve high reusability.

Just to clarify: The consortium comprises various companies. It should also be mentioned that the Fraunhofer ISST plays a key role in driving this, and they are responsible for establishing this data space for the machinery and plant engineering sector. Are these the classic manufacturers known from the shop floor, or are there other companies involved? Who is in this consortium to develop an open standard?

Sebastian

It’s a very broadly structured consortium and listing all 47 partners would be difficult To give an overview: SAP and Siemens are the consortium leaders, the BMWK is the sponsor responsible for the flagship project. It includes both machinery and plant engineering companies like the Uhlman Group, as well as software manufacturers like soffico. Associations, such as the VDMA are also represented.

I see. It’s important to get a sense of which partners are involved. Bastian, you’ve already mentioned some of your projects. It’s crucial that when purchasing machinery or switching suppliers in the future, there is a certain standard to access data. Can you put it that way?

Bastian

Yes, one of the use cases we’re driving forward together with soffico pursues such goals. If we succeed in establishing and using standards that describe components, modules, or entire machines, display their capabilities, and identify themselves in production, we achieve modular production. This results in significantly higher flexibility, whether in tool changes, updates, upgrades, or in our pharmaceutical, static production environments during rapid validation and revalidation in the event of updates or upgrades. Thanks to this self-description, we achieve this. Modular Production is one of the shared use cases we are advancing in this project.

You also mentioned the industry. Are there industry-specific dependencies you need to consider? Especially in the pharma sector, there are many compliance regulations. What do you need to consider in terms of regulation and compliance, especially in the pharma sector?

Bastian

Just to clarify, so there’s no misunderstanding, Factory-X is not intended to solve all the problems of the pharmaceutical industry. We are deliberately part of a consortium of companies focused on industrial production. As Sebastian already mentioned, other producers and manufacturers of production equipment are also involved, such as DMG and Trumpf, who are active in the field of machine tools. Uhlmann is the third major machinery manufacturer in the consortium and contributes pharmaceutical-specific aspects like quality control, quality tracking, and proof of quality data in a specialized manner. Topics such as the validation of the production process are also aspects that we incorporate into the use cases, thereby taking industry-specific requirements into account. At the same time, we recognize significant synergies that drive us as machinery manufacturers, as well as the component suppliers involved in the consortium, forward together.

You also mentioned data sets necessary for quality control. When you undertake such projects, do you typically already have access to this data? Do you have specific systems, such as an MES or others, to which you have access? How do you handle it?

Bastian

Here, we must specify who we are. The pharmaceutical producer, the factory operator, naturally has access to the essential quality-describing data sets today, both in the form of live data and, for example, through the so-called audit trail, which is formally stored to ensure that production was conducted in a qualified manner. Uhlmann initially sees very little of this data because the availability of data beyond the company boundary of the pharmaceutical producer – and this also applies to companies like DMG or Trumpf – is severely limited. Here we encounter topics like IT security or data security that stand in our way, where producing companies – we are partly included in this – categorically block access. This limits the scaling of the digital business and digital services we can provide.

Sebastian, you have very different customers, and in the project, various manufacturing companies are involved. What are typical data or data types relevant for these kinds of projects? Do you have examples from other customers or data you need to solve this? What data types are typical?

Sebastian

I would distinguish between master data and usage data. Master data are the data that exist in the companies producing the machine or equipment. These could also include configuration data or descriptive data like the operating manual, which can become very important in later stages of the value chain. At some point, the machine leaves the factory, is set up at the customer’s site, and enters the usage phase. Then the usage data come into play: How is the machine actually used? How does it run? This information is again important for the equipment and machine manufacturer to provide after-sales service. These are the different types of data that are relevant at various stages of the product lifecycle and need to be integrated, but are currently sometimes difficult to access. Especially in the pharma sector, it’s a very closed system. The pharmaceutical manufacturer is probably less interested in sharing this data back with you.

Bastian

It will be crucial to argue the real value of data availability. A producer always weighs the cost-benefit ratio. Today, the costs are very high because they must conclude individual solutions, contracts, and data agreements. The benefits are often unclear, as many solutions are not yet fully developed, and the customer’s needs are not always well understood. We face the challenge of doing this today. However, I am convinced that we can quickly overcome this hurdle if we make use cases, like those we pursue with Factory-X, truly functional and economically viable. If we lower the hurdle of individual connectivity, both in the shop floor and in the value chain, then I believe we will achieve a cost-benefit ratio that we can also scale.

We already talked about Factory-X, where you develop approaches and solutions to further develop open standards and concepts already available in the market. I would like to understand better how that works. Why is it needed, and why is it important? Can you explain the core principle of Factory-X and what you are currently working on? Not everything is finished yet, but maybe you can give some insights into how the solution you’re developing in this consortium will look. I’m very interested in that.

Bastian

At its core, we have set up a project as a consortium that focuses on specific use cases, such as modular production and aspects of sustainability. We have established a large subproject that aims to provide a common technical foundation. This means we combine the use case with the ambition of a common technical foundation. This technical basis builds on existing components such as Catena-X and the EDC connector. We will massively rely on Industry 4.0 fundamentals, particularly the Asset Administration Shell and its associated concepts. But it’s also about ensuring that other standards like OPC UA or ECLASS find their place in this construct, so we don’t reinvent the wheel but instead create the missing connections between the technologies and the use cases.

Perfect. Perhaps for context, for those listeners who don’t hear about this daily: Catena-X is an automotive network that creates an open data ecosystem for the automotive industry, spanning the entire value chain, if I understand correctly. And the Asset Administration Shell topic was explained in detail in Podcast Episode 128 by Thorsten Kroke from ECLASS. So you use these fundamental principles as part of Factory-X. How does your solution, Orchestra, come into play here, Sebastian? Is it the IT/OT integration level or is there more?

Sebastian

Orchestra is a means to an end. The goal in the subproject mentioned by Sebastian, which lays the technological foundations, is to develop a generic adapter and all the necessary technical artifacts required to implement the desired architecture. Everything will be open source and broadly available. The knowledge should not remain exclusive to soffico and Orchestra, but rather the goal is to build an adapter that enables data exchange between companies along the value chain in a standardized manner. Our goal is to integrate this knowledge into our product early on, so that our customers, both existing and new, can easily log into this data ecosystem and leverage the technical foundation. Another point is that Orchestra enables the connection of all legacy systems, as the data still resides within these systems in the companies. These data need to be translated into the target format, the Factory-X adapter. Here, Orchestra can provide enormous value.

Bastian

One point Sebastian emphasized is that we, as a consortium, work together to design architectures and standards that can then be translated into interoperable solutions. It’s about defining principles, architectures, and standards that will enable these capabilities in the future. With the foundation provided by Orchestra, along with the contributions of the other consortium partners, we are providing valuable knowledge and preliminary work from our projects and Industry 4.0 initiatives.

The goal is to agree on such architectural principles and implement the corresponding standards. The interoperability of solutions that take these principles into account will be crucial.

For example, in our ERP world, we are classic SAP users, but not all companies use SAP. It can’t be that master data exchange is only possible with other SAP partners. We need interoperability of master data management systems to enable a more efficient exchange of this information.

Okay, so it’s a defined architecture based on certain methodologies and solutions. The data is standardized, but it’s not about merging all the data but creating a decentralized structure where data can be accessed. Connectors are then standardized for use. Is that correct?

Sebastian

A very important architectural principle is data sovereignty. It’s crucial that companies do not throw their data into a common pool and thereby lose control over it. Most companies wouldn’t be willing to do that, fearing they’d jeopardize their IP or lose a competitive advantage. The idea is to communicate externally which data you have and what you can offer in the market, while providing a way to regulate who has access to this data through contracting. This way, the company always retains control over who receives the data, can potentially monetize it, and ensures that the data is exchanged in a standardized format.

The three essential parts are: the catalog of what you have, the contracting of who can access it, and the actual data exchange.

What should I do if I’m listening now and thinking, this is exactly our topic?

We’re working on it too, maybe differently, and are interested in participating in such structures. Is this something where one can actively participate, or do you need to become a partner?
How does that work?

Bastian

In the consortium, we deliberately stated that we are currently 47 pioneers, but there are additional X-projects, such as Process-X, Semiconductor-X, etc., with which we closely collaborate to develop joint solutions. The Factory-X project has a clear mandate to bring these architectures, principles, and solutions into the broader industry as quickly as possible. Therefore, right at the start of the project, we created opportunities for interested parties to participate, whether by listening or contributing. You don’t have to become part of the consortium immediately. We have established a Customer Sounding Board where particularly interested industry representatives, who might want to operate part of their business in a data space in the future, can learn about the use cases. In parallel, there is a Technical Sounding Board where technology providers, whether large or small, like soffico or a software company, can already delve into technical topics. So here’s a clear call to action: Feel free to reach out. We will also link to the website where you can position yourself as an interested party.

Exactly: If you’re interested, feel free to contact Sebastian or Bastian. I will include both contacts in the show notes. Is there also a further link, for example, to the official website of the Fraunhofer Institute or other sources where you can find more information? If someone wants to dive deeper into the topic, do you have anything available for that?

Bastian

We will provide links to both Manufacturing-X and Factory-X. The fundamental principles are already described there through preliminary studies and other documents. Feel free to contact the Factory-X consortium if you want to learn more.

Very nice. I have a thousand more questions, but today was about giving you the space to present the project. I believe Factory-X is already well-known in the industry, but perhaps some are not yet involved or are facing similar challenges. It’s important to talk about it because everyone has different use cases that need to be scalable in practice. Such initiatives are very important. Perhaps to conclude: What can we look forward to in the future?

The project is still ongoing for a while.

What are you working on right now? What’s coming next year?

Sebastian

Factory-X will run until mid-2026. There will surely be many exciting insights that will also be freely accessible. In November, the new version 5 of Orchestra will be released. It will offer many innovative AI assistants, making data integration even easier. Connectivity as a No-Brainer will become a reality, and you can look forward to that.

Very nice, that calls for its own episode. There’s certainly a lot to discuss. Thank you for this session. I think we got a good overview of what Factory-X is all about, the use cases you have at the Uhlmann Group, and the challenges in advancing your digital business. Thank you for your time and for sharing such practical insights.

If anyone is listening and interested, feel free to get in touch. With that, I hand over the last word to you. Thank you for joining us today.

Sebastian

Thank you, Madeleine.

Bastian

Yes, thank you very much. It was a great opportunity to talk about this and drive our partnership in this direction. We enjoyed it very much.

Sebastian

I agree. Thank you for the invitation, Bastian. Thanks for the sparring. I’m looking forward to the next podcast. It was a lot of fun.

Very nice. Thank you very much and have a nice rest of the week. Take care. Bye.

Sebastian

Bye.

Bastian

Bye.