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By RAY CHALMERS, Contributing Editor MindSphere is Siemens' cloud-based ecosystem for digitally viewing, engineering and commissioning production lines. INSIDE THE DIGITAL FACTORY "Digitalization changes everything," says Raj Batra, president of Siemens USA's Digital Factory Div. ( siemens.com/businesses/us/en/digital-factory. htm ). The company has developed what it calls a completely integrated end-to-end "digital ecosystem" that connects product design through simulated production, with the potential for breakthrough productivity gains in the real manufacturing world. Research says the number of connected devices will approach 1 trillion by 2030. While thermostats and smart appliances are on the rise, the bulk of these connected devices will be in the manufac- turing enterprise. Within this framework, the most important driver remains improving time to market, Batra says. Creating a digital twin of the entire value chain—modeling and simulating product design, production planning, production engineering, production execution on digital machine tools, and related services—will create a common data backbone that will go a long way to eliminating mistakes, redundancies and trial-and-error in all these areas when things are actually produced. This is not just talk. Siemens has invested approximately $10-billion over the last 10 years in both acquisitions and internal efforts building its Digital Enterprise approach, which includes a suite of simulation, communication and services-based software products, all under an open, cloud-based operating system Siemens is calling "MindSphere." BEGINNING AT HOME Siemens is a manufacturer, too, so it is using the tech in its own factories. For example, a facility in Bad Neustadt, Germany, was efficiently producing 500,000 servo motors annually. But simulating both old and new equipment and connecting these digital twins to electronic production planning and engineering uncovered significant new efficiencies. Setup times for new machine tools were reduced 60 percent; cycle times for several parts were reduced by up to 20 percent and plant utili- zation, at 70 percent for fiscal year 2016, is forecast to hit 90 percent by 2020. And the plant is now producing 700,000 servo motors annually. All this integrated design, engineering, production planning and production simulation takes place under MindSphere, a cloud-based operating system open to integrating both Siemens-developed and third-party applications for production improvement. "MindSphere is the means to provide Integrated digital tech can greatly improve even efficient operations. 58