“Through this solution, we are strengthening our competitiveness in the global market, while once again demonstrating our commitment to a safe and ergonomic working environment. Through the AFRY Real Digital Twin, a virtual reality will be built as an exact copy of the planned physical equipment, allowing it to be trimmed and tested virtually and then implemented. It has a wide range of uses including predictive maintenance, operator training, optimisation and safety protocol simulations.Īs a natural step towards increased digitalisation, Hitachi ABB Power Grids’ factory in Ludvika will now create a digital twin of a robot cell that handles capacitors. It represents a fundamental change to the traditional ABB culture.A digital twin is a virtual copy of a physical object or system which provides the opportunity to build, test and verify the production environment in a virtual world that can simulate a variety of different conditions. Going forward, a simplified organization should find favor with both ABB customers and employees. For example the Select I/O (“smart I/O”) for its ABB System 800xA was later to the market (1Q2017) than many competing products, albeit ABB did a superb job of engineering the solution and developing accompanying software that enabled it to deliver value to customers. And while this may have complicated things for ABB customers, it also complicated the processes of strategy and product development within ABB. ![]() ABB’s organization has been fiendishly complex for many, many years. The presentation included a single slide illustrating this progression (see figure). ABB Organizations (Source: ABB)įinally, one aspect of yesterday’s announcement that hasn't been discussed much is ABB’s abandonment of a matrix-style organization and adoption of a simplified organizational structure. It’s a unique asset that should be carefully cultivated by the business owners, new and old. For decades, that R&D organization has been the genesis of technologies that enabled ABB to succeed in the grid business, especially the HVDC area. Second, is the relationship between Power Grids and the centralized ABB R&D organization. On the positive side, electric utilities never rely on a single OEM for their T&D assets, either. ![]() Going forward ABB will not have an OEM position for these solutions. Examples are asset health for transformers, substation optimization, APM for power T&D, and DERMS (Distributed Energy Resource Management Solution). Here are my take-aways from those discussions:įirst, a fair share of the existing ABB Ability solutions has targeted the Power Grids business. This makes sense given that ABB is now the only “one-stop-shop” with leading positions in both of these segments.Ī major move like this caused a lot of discussion among the ARC analysts who cover various ABB businesses and technologies. CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer answered that the close pairing of factory automation and robotics offered the greatest opportunity at present. There was a question during the announcement webcast concerning the placement of B&R with the ABB Robotics business. The divestment places the remaining ABB more concentrated in industrial automation, especially with the 2017 acquisition of B&R, a global thought leader in factory automation and machine control. ABB shareholders will receive roughly $7.7 billion from the transaction through buybacks or similar actions. The months of speculation derived from the European activist investor Cevian Capital, which won a seat on the ABB Board in 2017, apparently with an agenda of breaking up the group.
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