DISA, ItalPresseGauss, StrikoWestofen and Wheelabrator are embracing digital technologies to solve the challenges of tomorrow today. Each brand has worked with its customer base to address common needs and have made progress to deliver industry-changing solutions. Some brands have worked with external digital experts, others have harnessed their foundry expertise to create new products in-house.
Now, we are delighted to launch Norican Digital β a new Norican brand. Norican Digital will encompass the learnings, expertise and customer experience from across the breadth of the group to develop new digital technology to shape our industry; continuing to work with external digital partners, universities and specialists when required.
Launching Norican Digital
With Norican Digital, Norican Group welcomes a new member to the Norican family. The IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) start-up was founded in 2017 by StrikoWestofen executives Rudi Riedel and Dr. Dennis Janitza.
Based in Munich, the brand develops ready-to-deploy digital technology products tailored to applications around the formation and enhancement of metallic parts. The ultimate goal: use digitisation effectively to improve customers’ bottom lines.
Dennis Janitza explains: “The idea behind Norican Digital is to have a dedicated organisation solely focussed on the exploration and development of digital technologies for the sectors and technical processes that the Norican Group has deep expertise in. Deploying these technologies in industrial or technical contexts requires a high level of application knowledge. At the same time, it is useful to pool digital expertise and resources centrally to really drive development and make it easy for our customers to specify and utilise IIoT infrastructure and technology.”
Norican Digital’s first products are already up and running as proofs of concepts in pilot customer projects, and the team is looking to make its first solutions commercially available in Q4 2018.
The products in development revolve around connecting equipment and setting up solid, standardised IIoT infrastructure that enables the secure collection and storage of process data as a basis for
Industry 4.0. The solutions offer:
- Full transparency: visualise and document performance and condition data in real time on any device
- Increased productivity: turn data into insight to optimise production
- Predictive maintenance: utilise the full lifetime of wear parts and minimise downtime
- Real-time analysis: detect anomalies by combining constant data collection with machine learning algorithms
To develop products that work in real-life technical process environments and align with individual customer requirements, the team has been working closely with pilot customers – for example in collaborative design workshops.
Dennis Janitza adds: “The key for us is to create end-to-end solutions that do what our customers need them to do, at a good price point. What we bring to the table is the knowledge of what is possible digitally, plus a profound understanding of our customers’ worlds. In our workshops, we can bring all that together - our digital arsenal, our knowledge of the technical processes and the customer’s ideas of what can be improved, what needs fixing, where the potential might lie in their own production.”
“In the context of the Norican Group, our role is to keep scanning the horizon for the best technologies, be it from start-ups or bigger tech companies, to test them and then apply them to our industries. For our customers, this means faster access to digital technologies, without time-consuming experimentation. We can draw on experience from projects across industries and applications to implement digital projects more quickly. What would take an in-house team months or years to develop, we can sometimes do in a few days.”