Digitalisation is the most important topic for European industry

Munich, 14 May 2025 - Sina Scheidle, Head of BodyTEC at Mercedes-Benz AG, and former BDI President Prof. Siegfried Russwurm discussed the digitalisation of German and European industry with professors at the spring conference in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. ‘We are in global competition, we must take note of this and work on our competitiveness in production before we fall even further behind,’ emphasised Russwurm, acting Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp and the Voith Group. WGP President Prof Michael Zäh added: ‘Despite the many achievements already made, there is still great potential for improvement.’

Sina Scheidle was able to report on her experiences at the BodyTEC centre. The centre has end-to-end responsibility for the production of body parts and pressing tools. This includes all process steps from the development of the forming tools to production in the pressing plant.
Scheidle also presented the Mercedes-Benz digital production ecosystem, MO360 for short. She reported on how, with the help of digital twins and virtual commissioning, all data from individual production systems was digitally recorded and planned, tested and adapted accordingly in virtual space. ‘Thanks to generative AI, it was possible to reduce energy consumption by 20% in the top coat booths at the Rastatt plant, for example,’ said Scheidle. Interested employees can train to become digitalisation experts at the Digital Factory Campus Berlin, for example.
 

Specialists and managers are the bottleneck
The training of today's and tomorrow's specialists and managers was also a major topic in the panel discussion. Siegfried Russwurm emphasised that companies need to work ‘significantly’ on the topic of internships for students, for example, in order to show the attractive professional reality in engineering professions and at the same time enable a sense of achievement in concrete projects. 
In order to meet the demand for so-called data workers, Mercedes-Benz has launched the internal in-service training programme D.SHIFT. ‘It qualifies employees for digitalisation and AI tasks and shapes them into ‘digital superheroes’, as they are known internally,’ said Scheidle. Driving digitalisation forward and finding enough well-trained people to do so is one of the biggest challenges facing German and European industry in the face of global competition, warned Russwurm.

Russwurm countered the question of whether AI has been sufficiently incorporated into university curricula with the statement that there is no such thing as ‘enough’. It is much more important to show young people that AI is not just in ChatGPT and mobile phones. We need to familiarise them with AI applications in production, but then also ‘let the digital natives do it’ - in project work in industry and at university institutes.

In order to rapidly advance Industry 4.0, cooperation between research and practice must also be intensified. Universities should not only focus their funding on state support, but also specifically seek private sector investors. According to the former BDI President, industry must play its part and also contribute money. 

Further research on Manufacturing-X
Industry 4.0 and digitalisation is one of the most important research topics at the 44 WGP institutes. The WGP professors therefore want to examine the extent to which the further development of Industry 4.0 should be taken up as part of the Manufacturing-X initiative - i.e. the development of cooperating, decentralised data ecosystems along complete process and supply chains. With regard to the further development of production research, we not only need to understand the approaches in Manufacturing-X, but we also need to help shape them as the WGP,’ emphasises Prof. Thomas Bergs, spokesperson for the working group. This also includes making the potential arising from these initiatives available to medium-sized manufacturing companies and thus, for example, developing traceability as a business model. Which issues are relevant for German and European industry and which standards are already working today will be examined using specific use cases, such as the end-to-end quality control of safety-critical engine turbine discs as part of the Aerospace - X project. ‘At the autumn conference in November, we will then take a close look at other project initiatives, such as Factory -X, and identify relevant fields of action for the WGP,’ says Bergs.