ARC Advisory Group (Munich, Germany):

Gueldner F., Director of Research, e-mail: redaktion@stahleisen.de

The European automation industry puts great hopes into the overall trend of small-scale local production, which will be enabled via digitalization and latest automation technology. The trend of small-scale local production should keep production facilities in Europe and may even result in an increasing share of manufacturing as share of the GDP. For the European industry, it is necessary to increase the share of automation, increase time-to-customer, and increase flexibility. Otherwise, it won't be competitive to low-wage country mass production. Transparency, big data analytics, mass customization, remote operations, remote maintenance, etc. are a few buzzwords in this discussion. All this is then summarized by the term Industrie 4.0, which is increasingly used in inlationary manner.