Softing is now member of the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) Community, an independent alliance which was established in 2019 by Microsoft and BMW Group under the umbrella of the Joint Development Foundation. The group’s aim is to create a technology framework and open community to share smart factory solutions across the automotive and manufacturing sectors to significantly accelerate future Industrial IoT developments. Built on the Microsoft Azure Industrial IoT cloud platform, the Open Manufacturing Platform will provide a reference architecture with open-sourced components based on open industrial standards as well as an open data model. Several working groups within OMP where created to focus on core areas important to the industry.
Softing is part of the “IoT Connectivity” and “Manufacturing Reference Architecture” working groups and contributes its expertise in OPC UA and cloud connectivity. The groups will develop and define industrial-grade plug & play integration patterns for greenfield and brownfield equipment, as well as fully scalable reference architecture blueprint to simplify deployment and management of the entire cloud and edge manufacturing environment. This will enable the establishment of IoT use cases for manufacturing in the field of analytics e.g. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) calculation and analysis, predictive maintenance for automation equipment or process data analysis to ensure process quality. The tasks and objectives of Softing in this context include the seamless integration of its dataFEED product family into relevant reference architectures for Industrial IoT.
“Softing is in a good position to serve both greenfield and brownfield applications worldwide. We know the OT world and understand the language of engineers and the shop floor. At the same time, our products enable the connection of OT and IT. We will be bringing this expertise to the OMP Group and are looking forward to new opportunities for collaboration across the entire manufacturing chain,” say Frank Steinhoff, Managing Director of Softing Industrial Automation.
Other members of the initiative include Anheuser-Busch InBev, Bosch, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Capgemini and Siemens.
