Design Insights is a new daily column recapping some of the trends and highlights from Machine Design editors.
All in the Family
Machine Design has written extensively about the importance of engaging the next generation of design engineers. One family already has that process down to a science, and we’re a small part of that effort.
Meet Avery, age 2-½. His mom Robin is an engineer for Bosch, and his grandfather William is a P.E. with his own engineering firm. It is his grandfather who provides him with the monthly issue of Machine Design for his review. He’s also the one who sent us the picture.
Engineering is in Avery’s blood—he’s already a fourth-generation Machine Design reader and could grow up to be a fifth-generation engineer. That kind of loyalty should be rewarded, so we’re going to sed Avery his own subscription.
History, 225 Years in the Making
Bosch Rexroth is marking its 225th anniversary this year with a more socially-distant celebration than the company might have liked, but still with a rich tradition and a global reach.
To put 225 years in perspective, George Washington was still in his first term as president when Georg Ludwig Rexroth built his hammer mill in Germany’s Spessart Valley. In the 1850s, the company moved to the Lohr Valley, where the global headquarters still are located, but today their 31,000 employees now work on every continent.
Besides the usual internal and external celebrations, Bosch Rexroth also commissioned its own music video for the milestone.
Getting IT and OT on the Same Page
Technology remains one of the great drivers of industrial efficiency. Very often, it’s the people that get in the way of technology being as efficient as it can be.
The Industrial Internet Consortium is looking at ways to ensure the IT and OT teams are singing off the same sheet of music when it comes to digital transformation. The group has developed a whitepaper called BizOps for Digital Transformation in Industry (BDXI), designed to create a framework for more collaborative processes.
“Digital transformation is a huge topic influencing almost every department of a firm,” said white paper co-author Kai Hackbarth of Bosch.IO in a press release. “Solutions operators must integrate IT and OT to achieve better business outcomes, especially in asset-driven industries such as agriculture, energy, health care, manufacturing, retail, smart cities and transportation. This is not an easy task, as the process is slow and likely to conflict with existing processes and management systems.”
BDXI’s larger goal is to break down the bottlenecks between business systems, design parameters and operational necessities. That’s a key issue for many manufacturing teams, and one of the common challenges for any digital transformation process.