Roland Bent_v4

Speaker: Roland Bent, Chief Representative International Standardization, Phoenix Contact

Roland Bent: Hello, my name is Rolland Bent. I'm President of the German National Committee of the IEC and I'm President of DKE, the german electrotechnical standards organization. I'm working for Phoenix Contact, a global player in automation technology and digitalization and I was responsible for the company's products and technology as the CTO of Phoenix Contact for almost 20 years. My case study on digital transformation covers both aspects of this short introduction, the challenges of an innovative company and the activities in DKE supporting the industry to meet these challenges. Of course when we are talking about digitalization, everyone is familiar with process projects and smart production or new big data based business models. However, the administrative processes of companies are just as important and the central process in this regard is the product creation and life cycle process. In this process, a wide variety of product requirements play a central role, be it functional, custom specific, legal or approval requirement.

Roland Bent: And traditionally paper based specifications are created for this purpose in which all product requirements are documented manually and without any links to each other with each new product, the effort is completely repeated. Knowhow on the relevance of for example, standards for a product family is in the heads of people instead of being in the system and if a requirement changes for example, for the product certification then all products and functions affected by this change must be determined manually.

Roland Bent: With today's diversity of products and variants with the increasing number of binding requirements, this is a process that is almost impossible to be managed properly and is also extremely error prone. Well, digital tools such as PLM tools can have an enormous effect here. And that's why already for several years we've been working on the consistent introduction of a completely integrated and company wide network product lifecycle management system and the central component in this is a digital and integrated requirements system.

Roland Bent: All information that arises during the whole life cycle of the product is now correlated and permanently stored. And that means that the creation of new products now can be done with less efforts based on this digital knowledge base.

Roland Bent: However, the digital process change still has a significant break at one point. It's about recognizing the relevance of requirements or their changes and entering them then into the system. Standards are essential carriers of requirement information today. However, this information is contained in paper or paper-like documents.

Roland Bent: The solution would be to consistently close the digital process chain with smart standards and in this case with machine readable standards in an xml format. But what should the right smart standards look like? The right standard, smart standard for the industry needs for their digital processes. And to this end, DKE together with DIN in Germany founded IDiS in 2020. IDiS stands for initiative for digital standards. It is the national stakeholder platform for smart standards. Today this platform comprises about ninety members with a focus on important players from industry but also from associations and from science. They are working jointly together to define requirements for smart standards and processes for the integration of these smart standards then into the customer applications. IDiS has meanwhile published two white papers on smart standards, among others. Ideas is their defining five levels

Roland Bent: white papers. Smart standards must be viewed holistically and internationally and that's why IDiS members are also working in european and international activities on smart standards. They are contributing the relevant findings and they get the respective feedback and they for example, are also involved in the IEC SG 12 taskforces. Smart standards do not exist for free. They only exist if everyone cooperates. The standardization organizations must digitally develop their knowledge directly and rethink their processes in the future. The users, they have to design their own processes of course digitally and consistently like I have described it here only in this way they can have directly access and immediately access to the knowledge stored in digital formats and can process this knowledge. And the direct provision and of data based and xml formatted standards to the customers, requires also rethinking and new business models. On the side of the Standardization

Roland Bent: It is easy to see the efficiency and quality potential of this integrated approach. All information related to the product life cycle is no longer stored in individual isolated paper or paper-like documents. Instead, it is now stored in an integrated system consistently related to each other and enriched with meta data for further automated processing. This stores knowledge and keeps it available for future work. With smart standards and the appropriate database interfaces on both sides the process of incorporating normative requirements and the changes into product specifications could be almost completely automated. That means turning workloads of days into a few hours or even into minutes. And in addition to this enormous gain in efficiency, this highly automated process leads also to a significant increase in product quality.

Roland Bent: So it's more than obvious. Smart standards are the future. Actually not just the future. Smart standards have to arrive in the present. We need them today.