Software-defined manufacturing Aiming for billions in sales with factory software

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One billion euros in 2030 - Bosch Industrietechnik made a confident announcement this week at a press conference in the model factory in Ulm, Germany. This is how much turnover the company wants to generate with software and software-related services for factories.

The offering consists of three areas: With ctrlX Automation, Bosch Rexroth offers a rapidly growing ecosystem for factory automation. Software from the Nexeed portfolio of Bosch Connected Industry is used by customers as well as in around 150 Bosch plants. And finally, the Bosch Semantic Stack software portfolio forms the basis for digital twins of products.

CtrlX OS is the operating system for production

The open automation system ctrlX Automation from Bosch Rexroth has only been in existence for five years. During this time, over 2,000 customers have been acquired. Over 100 partner companies have added software and hardware to the CtrlX World range of solutions.

The company now offers more than 80 apps via its ctrlX OS Store. These range from communication and IoT solutions to vision and engineering apps, all of which are validated by Bosch Rexroth. Around half of the apps come from third-party providers.

Link between OT and IT: Nexeed

Bosch Connected calls its Industry 4.0 software Nexeed "the brain of the smart factory". Nexeed forms the software layer between OT and IT, so to speak, controlling production on the one hand and creating transparency about what is going on in production on the other.

As Bosch uses the software solutions in around 150 of its own factories, the company can provide verifiable figures: As a result, factories become up to 25 percent more productive, the availability of machines is increased by up to 15 percent, while maintenance costs are reduced by up to 25 percent. Nexeed is also used by international customers such as Sick and Osram.

With Nexeed, everyone responsible for production has exactly the information they need. Production employees are supported directly at the machine with the help of artificial intelligence, among other things. The model factory showed how an employee can use an app and voice input to record incidents at a station, enter them in the digital shift book and inform the next shift. The AI can also search for similar situations and suggest solutions.

Semantic stack turns data into digital twins

Among other things, the solution also provides data for the Bosch Semantic Stack. Its software portfolio creates a semantic data layer that makes product data understandable for humans and machines throughout the life cycle, assigns it to a digital twin and thus makes the data usable for decision-making.

Bosch uses the solution itself and has already created more than 400 million digital twins of its products across the company. Thanks to this, data can be used more easily and securely across company boundaries.

As an example, Norbert Jung presented the digital battery passport, which will be mandatory in the EU from 2027 for all batteries for vehicles and industry with a capacity of more than two kilowatt hours. The battery passport contains a wide range of data covering the entire battery life cycle.

This is where Bosch offers the Battery Passport, a module of the Bosch Semantic Stack. This fulfills the legal requirements and uses digital twins to automatically create the necessary battery passports for end-to-end data transparency throughout the entire life cycle.

Even if the components of the portfolio presented are already familiar, CtrlX Automation, Nexeed and Semantic Stack work together to show what the solutions of the future are all about: data is generated, enriched, linked and reused to optimize the process. The model factory in Ulm is an impressive example of how the solutions work together.