After Volkswagen, Seat and Skoda, another German historic brand works with SAPA: Porsche. Giovanni Affinita announced it at the Italian Embassy in Berlin, during the German-Italian Innovation Conference, attended by all of the most important Italian and German industries.
I must confess: Addressing the Italian and German Industries, presenting our vision of smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0 hasn’t been easy.
Favored by the emotion, I believe.
Actually, I sat at the same table with automotive giants like BASF, Bosh, Lamborghini…
Other speakers at the event included Vincenzo Boccia, President, Confindustria and Dieter Kempf, President, Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie.
Nevertheless, I felt proud to be there, rather than concerned.
As in Detroit, where 2 months ago, SAPA has been awarded, side by side with Ford and General Motors, among the top 5 biggest innovations of the year, presented by SPE Automotive TPO Conference 2017 in Detroit (the oldest event – 19 editions – related to plastics for automotive).
The German-Italian Innovation Conference in Berlin is another of the steps towards innovation we decided to take, with strength and courage.
I tell it because the partnership between SAPA and Porsche represents a significant milestone on this route: we will develop components of their brand new electric project, the Porsche Mission E.
An announcement I wanted to make, alongside the Conference in Berlin.
Where better place…than Germany?
In the near future I’ll reveal you more details about this partnership and this so engaging and innovative project.
But before, let me share with you the words I used addressing all companies and officials present at the Embassy.
That was a challenging speech, as said before. The voice breaking with emotion, for being in a such stimulating and fascinating context.
I want to share with you SAPA vision on the future of manufacturing, since I believe that the choices we make will have a significant impact for you as well, if you are a carmaker.
We’ll make the components production’s control easier and smooth, raising it every day one step further.
For raising the cars you produce, every day one step further.
Below you will find my speech.
If you want to further explore this topic and discuss it with our engineers, write now to customercare@sapagroup.it, one of SAPA Genius will contact you within 24 hours.
Hello everyone,
I am glad for the invitation and I thank you for the wonderful organization.
Just some highlights about Sapa: Sapa is a company that in two year increased its turnover of 20% and next year we will accomplish the same.
I would like to present some data, which I believe are relevant for understanding the impact of Industry 4.0 in our manufacturing system. Sapa is a company that produces and develops plastic manufacturing for automotive. We produce more than 1000 different types of products and we use more than 10.000 different types of row material. Every year, within our group, we produce more than 43 million components.
Our company specializes in injection molding, robot assembling, robot polishing, and robot painting.
Let me say, we manufacture within the group and for us it is essential that all the system is integrated. In our company, Industry 4.0’s vision is achieved by an integrated system inside all company’s aspects: inside production, inside quality and logistic.
One of the main focuses of our project, that we call “The Wiki”, is about the fact that the machine has to talk to us. An artificial intelligence we are building, to analyze and understand all the data we collect.
Just some example of the data we are talking about: Let me say that these are just some example, because we are talking about more than 100 data for each second of production.
So imagine how many data we have at our disposal.
We have 100 data for each second of production, for each component for 43 million components/year. We can monitor temperature, pressure and humidity of the row material, during the production, the temperature of the molding tool during the production, the time that we spend for ordinary and extraordinary maintenance.
We have a couple of case studies further: The robot painting in my opinion is very interesting, because we found out that a share of the total scrap of our painting plant depends by weather condition: Industry 4.0 reduces our scraps for robot painting more than 50%…this is something possible as well!
We have the first step with data, in the second step we have the possibility to analyze, collect and understand the data and so we can act to solve the problem.
This is our conclusion about what is Industry 4.0 for making the difference in plastic manufacturing industries.
It is not a one-man job, in our opinion there is no possibility to develop one kind of professional process that has the ability to handle the entire project related to Industry 4.0.
We believe this should be a shared work because the impact of new technology is very massive on the day-by-day routine and we change the way our men work.
.Just another number in the second point: this year we have a turnover of about 180 million euro: If we consider, in the worst scenario, that this project will allow us to save 1.8% of the turnover, we will have more than 3.6 million euro to invest in newer resources.
What is important, in our view, is that now the challenge is about the use of data.
Before Industry 4.0, when we approached a project, the problem was having information, it was hard, it was not efficient, and the information was expensive.
Nowadays, thanks to Industry 4.0, we don’t have this kind of problem, because the costs of the new data are actually near to zero.
Giovanni Affinita – Sales Strategist and Board member of SAPA
