PM-Professional Switzerland - Programs and Projects for Innovation

  Beating the competition most of the time means having products that overdue the expectation of the customers, therefore companies look at their supply chain in a way to source components and technology at a good price. Most of the time companies achieve good sourcing costs by looking at the market in the far east.  In this way, they can remain profitable and sometimes that means "in the market".  However, taking control of a complex supply chain setup is very difficult, and the cost of not doing it can be huge. We can list some causes of what can put the business at risk:  Supplier is not properly qualified The production at supplier site is not qualified   Parts are not inspected before their shipment  Taking such conditions, companies have only a few chances to get control of their supply chain: Setting up an office in the region to support the supply chain operations Having dedicated resources to fly in and out and make the job done Using one of t...

Rome is experiencing the new Li-Fi technology, the use case is a computer lab of a school. The Light-Fidelity uses the light to transport the information. It reduces the pollution from the electro smog while it increases the data transmission speed (more than 10 GB).

Batteries are the key enabler for today's innovation in portability and moreover in mobility. For example, batteries make EV are heavy and have one big issue that can block customer adoption: charging time. StoreDot has developed a new technology to charge them faster. Commercial availability is going to be in 2021.  

The applications of UAV are growing and therefore also the generated business. While drone can let us thinking about battlefields and wars, the reality is that they can be used on a variety of civil applications, including packet delivery (i.e., Amazon), check infrastructures  (i.e., bridges, wirelines), to map and to monitor territories, rescue missions, and many more.  Fortune Business Insights reports that this business will reach more than 25 BUSD in 2027.  One of the promising company with a base in Switzerland and Sweden, that is partially owned is Saab AB, is UMS Skeldar which has already 2 products in its portfolio. They have already deployed a solution for piracy countermeasures.  

I have met Stefano Tempesta a couple of times in Zurich. This presentation shows the potentiality of the cloud platform applied to machine vision. Easy to set up in Azure with an interesting application. 

  The HW of an industrial robot is a set of actuator and sensors, however, this is not the main value of the machine. What makes the difference between a high performer industrial machine and a set of electronics devices is the software. The user interface, the communication capabilities, the control routines, the elaboration system, and the machine vision all together provide the value of the system.

  source pixabay In 2020 IT should be a strategic investment and should be focusing the added value that can bring into your organization:  mobility, customers and suppliers relationship, communication including social media, business intelligence, ... Top performer companies invest in these assets as well as in product/service innovation, including implementing business models IoT oriented.  

A.I., Machine Learning and  Deep Learning The capabilities to extract and process information from a mass of data drives the Industry 4.0 revolution. The machine can "learn by doing", or it can be trained. Here, SW plays a fundamental role for clustering, classifying and predicting. Artificial Intelligence and more specifically machine learning and deep learning algorithms help to solve such classes of problems.  #A .I.  #machinelearning   #deeplearning   #industry40

source pixabay.com Swissmem has reported that "in the first nine months of the year, new orders received declined by 13.2%, turnover by 3.7%, and exports by 1.4%. The downturn in the MEM industries has been rapid and severe. In the space of 15 months, order intake volumes have fallen by 27%." (Source Swissmem  ). According to this article, the situation is due to the global market and the missing orders for the export market. One other reason is the exchange rate between the Swiss Franc and the Euro. At the moment we are far away from the 1.20 CHF/Euro that could support the export to the near countries. What to do in this situation? Bringing back the Swiss industry competitiveness. Where to act? There are several actions to take. Product Development : reduce the development cycle for new product introduction. This is very important especially in the case of "design-to-order" business. Consider the possibility to move to an "assembly-to-order" ...

On the 3rd of September in Zurich, there has been the annual conference for Smartmaintenance. Preventive maintenance has the target to reduce the likelihood for a component or a part to break with the result of causing the operation stop. We know how this is important for our personal car but more important in business because every minute of stop mean losing money. Several business cases have been shown and I would like to report what I have found interesting. Win GD produces engines for Cargos and ships. Here is very important to have a system that: allow the crew to make easy troubleshooting, allow the notification to the engine supplier for a second support level, and allow the connection with the logistic in case a spare part is needed. Sulzer has a business line for pumps. They have developed a traditional IoT system based on sensors, network connection, and analytics to monitor their installation base and perform preventative maintenance. Altran has shown and...