Digital transition is already in production: Anie Automazione's comments

Electronics is the beating heart of industrial automation, a sector that expects to close 2021 with a turnover exceeding expectations and that is betting everything on technologies that enable the digital transition.

113
Anie industry dossier

The digital transition that we have heard so much about in recent months affects industry as well as the service sector and public administration. And it is electronics, the beating heart ofmanufacturing and process automation, that isenabling increasingly digital production processes. In2020, this sector recorded a turnover of €4.5 billion, a drop of 10.3% compared to 2019, but in the current year it has seen a recovery beyond expectations.

Marco Vecchio ANIE AutomationAs he explains Marco Vecchiosecretary of Anie Automation: "The preliminary figures for the first six months of 2021 (+15% year-on-year increase in turnover) and the most recent forecasts for the end of the year (+14% compared to 2020) drawn up by Anie Automazione show a market recovery that goes well beyond expectations and a recovery of pre-Covid levels. On the international front, despite the continuing instability of the global scenario, the sector will regain its dynamism on markets beyond its borders". However, the well-known problem of component shortages should not be underestimated. "The recovery is being confronted with tensions on the price and delivery time fronts for the main commodities used in the production process, together with a lack of supply. shortage phenomena for basic electronic components. This situation will persist throughout next year; for some materials we will then return to some sort of normality, but for others, such as silicon and copper, it is more difficult to make forecasts."

What is the general market situation for the automation sector?

The effects of the pandemic, with the heavy legacy left by the months of lockdown, severely penalised the sector. The negative change in aggregate turnover is in line with the average for manufacturing (-11%) but significant, especially when compared to the sector's history in recent years. The health emergency was part of a deteriorating picture from the second half of 2019, with domestic demand severely weakened by a gradual slowdown in industrial investments related to the Transition 4.0 Plan. The industry expressed a negative dynamic in turnover during 2020, and these trends were reflected in the demand for the Automation sector.

The outlook for foreign trade in 2020 changed dramatically during the first quarter of the year, when the Covid-19 virus changed the context. For the Industrial Automation sector, the weakness of domestic demand was compounded by a drop in foreign demand (-3% change in direct exports as a whole, compared to an average drop in manufacturing of 10%). In this scenario, a substantial heterogeneity in the performance on foreign markets emerged and, in a more general framework, the trade exchange data show a good competitive positioning of the Italian offer in digital technologies supporting production processes.

However, positive signals are coming from the market, where Automation technologies will play a key role in the transition process of manufacturing towards the goals of innovation, digital transformation and environmental transition.

You mentioned the axes of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan: how will this affect Italian businesses?

The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) will have to implement the Next Generation EU programme on the basis of three strategic axes: digitalisation and innovation (including the Transition 4.0 Plan), ecological transition and social inclusion. The aim is to correct the strong asymmetries from which we suffer: territorial, generational and gender, in addition to making the country more competitive. The world of industrial automation is changing rapidly: digitalisation, the increasingly widespread use of new technologies, and innovation are inevitably leading to a transformation of industrial models and a consequent evolution of the way we do business.

The recent Covid-19 pandemic was something of a turning point in the process of digitisation of businesses: digital transformation has become a business imperative. In fact, the companies that were able to thrive during the Covid-19 year and have shown greater resilience are those that invested more in digital technologies in the years before the pandemic.

Successful cases in the introduction of 4.0 technologies show that the actual possibility of seizing these opportunities passes through the development of a strategic vision with respect to the objectives to be pursued with digitisation and the production and business model to be implemented. In particular, these companies tend to approach Industry 4.0 projects - or, more generally, the digitisation of processes - with a systemic and wide-ranging approach, flanking technological innovation, and the consequent adaptation of production processes, with profound organisational innovation. It follows that the company itself and its management also need to deal with modern realities that are able to support them in these phases of change.

What is the impact of this change on Anie? 

In order to continue to play its supporting and representative role, the Association must try to keep up with these changes by offering its members an associative context in which they can easily recognise themselves, or a structure that can be compared to the real world. Hence the need, supported by the member companies, to expand the structure of Anie Automazione with the establishment of two new working groups dedicated respectively to the technology for 5G mobile networks and to the OPC UA communication standard . 5G stands for 'fifth generation' and defines particularly fast and powerful mobile telephony and internet connection technologies. 5G mobile network technology has the potential to transform automation technologies in a way that no wireless data transmission technology has ever done. The perimeter of investigation of the new working group set up at Anie Automazione will be 5G applications in the industrial field. Activities will focus on the study of use cases to highlight potential applications of the technology in the industrial sector. This information can be used for the necessary dissemination action, especially towards SMEs, also comparing 5G with other available wireless technologies. The new group is currently made up of some of the most representative companies in the world of industrial automation, but the aim is to open the discussion table to other players in the supply chain.

What are the objectives of the Anie working group dedicated to the communication standard OPC UA?

OPC UA is a freely available protocol designed specifically for industrial automation, which enables the exchange of information and data on devices within machines, between machines and between machines and systems. Its diffusion in the automation field and its interoperability have made it opportune to set up an ad hoc working group, made up of important companies in the industrial automation sector, focused on different action plans: the analysis of the adoption of the communication protocol and market trends, and communication not only towards OEMs, but also towards End Users, who are the real users of the technology. To this end, a white paper is being prepared that, through use cases, will highlight the advantages of using the OPC UA communication protocol. The constant work of modernisation of the association translates into a structure that is closer to the needs of member companies, but also of all the other players in the system, who see Anie Automazione as a modern and proactive player with whom to have a fruitful dialogue.

Previous articleAlba Pcb Group: an all-Italian success in the PCB market
Next articleAnalog Devices battery management IC to improve battery life

LEAVE A COMMENT

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here