The Digital Hub Industry as innovations lab
Lenze seeks to cooperate with science institutions and digital start-ups in order to master the challenges of digitization successfully. What began in the year 2000 as a collaboration with the University of Bremen and the founding of encoway leads in 2018 to the experimentation space called Dock One and culminates in the Digital Hub Industry (DHI) in 2022.
Here, new digital business models for drive technology and automation are developed, and Lenze is involved as co-founder and organizer. In the Bremen Technology Park, Lenze’s engineers work under one roof together with the university departments for 5G technology, artificial intelligence and industrial mathematics as well as with start-ups, all moderated by the Bremen Economic Development Agency. This is a space for experimentation, in which business models are developed and tried out.
Digital products and solutions are now a major part of the Lenze portfolio. The X4 Remote, showcased at the Hannover Messe in 2019, opens up new possibilities for machine diagnostics.
Operators no longer have to be on site, they can monitor and maintain their systems remotely in real time. Lenze uses this to collect data on motors, gearboxes, inverters and controllers at the end-customer’s site. The intelligent analysis of such data can lead to a considerable increase in production. And by comparing planning data with the data from the real environment, Lenze can continually optimize machine systems, for example with regard to energy consumption.
Collaboration in drive automation is essential in the age of digitization. Lenze works together with customers on automation solutions that are independent of the underlying machine components. Under the brand name NUPANO, Lenze has developed a platform that breaks with the framework of traditional control software, enabling machine manufacturers to access standardized solutions from the world of IT and thus significantly helping to bring digital solutions to the machine with relatively little effort, which is important in times of scarce resources. Together with its customers, Lenze is developing software for tomorrow’s world.