Smart Tooling – Smart Tools and Smart Services

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With demand for cheap products, prices plunge

What’s more, derivatisation also has increased significantly. Whereas the original VW Golf featured a total of five product lines in 1974, production has to handle as many as 13 product lines nowadays. And even though the need for tools has increased in total, tool budgets have for the most part remained stable, increasing the pricing pressure on tooling companies. This development has been intensified by smaller lot sizes for individual derivatives, leading to a rise in the costs for tools related to the total costs of a product.

As a result, the available budget for a single tool has decreased, forcing tooling companies to reduce prices even further. To make matters worse, globalisation has introduced new competitors to the market, coming from countries with lower factor costs and posing threats to the business models of tooling companies in high-wage countries. In summary, tooling companies in high-wage countries have had to manufacture complex tools for highly individualised products in ever-shorter timeframes. And if this isn’t enough, this challenge has had to be mastered at an entirely new price-performance level in order to preserve the competitiveness of the companies in question.

The answer to the question of how to address existing and upcoming challenges was in the past often found in the potential of new technologies. In the field of manufacturing, technical development is subdivided into several industrial revolutions. The third and most recent industrial revolution was brought about by the implementation of electronic and information technologies, which let to an increase in manufacturing automation.

Today, we are at the beginning of a fourth industrial revolution, characterised by continuous and intelligent networking of production, leading to a new level of organisation and control of the entire value creation chain on the basis of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Big Data, which makes it possible to analyse large data sets and provide new, invaluable knowledge, must also be mentioned as a fundamental part of the fourth industrial revolution. This new and effective method of generating information is a vital driver in achieving agility and mutability, which in turn is necessary to maintain and improve the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry, especially in high-wage countries. In Germany, this process is referred to as “Industry 4.0”. Three key elements are summarised by this term: Horizontal networking, vertical integration and the organisation of complex value creation systems.

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