Siemens held their Transform 2024 event at Manchester Central in July . Visited by thousands of participants and exhibiting spectacular technology offerings, it was a great event eagerly anticipated by our engineering team.

We first attended the Solution Partner Collaboration Evening the night before the exhibition and conference where we were treated to a sneak peek into what we could expect over the next two days. Followed by an interesting talk from guest speaker Perry McCarthy.

Digitalisation Updates

The next day, we first had a tour round Transform for a quick overview of everything Siemens had on offer. We discussed where we were interested in spending most of our time. For us engineers, this was of course at the Digitalisation and Industry sections.

The Digitalisation section included a plethora of interesting new technologies. One of particular interest was a quality assurance machine that used AI to detect faulty labels on drink bottles. The integration of AI programs with the Siemens hardware was of great interest to us. We believe this could be used in projects involving vision systems and fault detection.

We were also impressed to see the Siemens Industrial Copilot in development. This is an AI powered assistant for the TIA Portal environment. In the future this could assist software developers with labour intensive parts of coding and save valuable time in a project lifecycle.

The Industry section was a highlight of the Transform event. From cutting edge technology in the extensive Siemens marketplace to the latest advancements and solutions for industry. There were no shortage of stands for us to peruse. We got the latest information on brand new hardware such as the SINAMICS G220, a high performance frequency drive, and also the SIMATIC S7-1200 G2, a new series of the S7-1200 PLC.

The system for a standardised packaging line demonstrated a perfect use case for Industrial Edge, WinCC Unified and more than one of the SINAMICS drive range. This demo system included a Multi-Carrier-System using a series of linear motors as a smart conveyor system that was programmed to vary its speed. This  was in order to evenly space products as they travel on the conveyor. Our team was also eager to hear more on the topics of SIMATIC AX as well as digital twin technologies. Both of these are closely related to our current and future projects.

Conference Highlights

Siemens held multiple talks on the main stage of the event venue. Siemens representatives and other guest speakers would hold dynamic panel discussions and interactive sessions. We attended a talk titled “If digitalisation is the answer, what are the questions?”. Here Siemens CEO GB&I Carl Ennis provided us with a vision of the future of what a combined real and digital world could achieve. This spanned across operational performance, efficiency and net zero.

On the second and final day of Transform our team was fortunate to be taken around by Siemens Account Development Manager Dom Francis. Dom talked us through achieving modular automation using the Module Type Package (MTP). This is a new communication method between PLC and DCS that could prove highly applicable to Feed4ward projects.

Thank you to Siemens for hosting this years event. We experienced fresh takes on big trends in industry.

Adriane Bestic, Project Engineer.