Companies face a number of digitalisation challenges

Digitalisation is enabling domestic manufacturing and production companies to keep pace with their competitors and to retain and attract key customers – despite rapidly changing conditions.

Hungary has a particularly large number of manufacturing and assembly companies whose partners are multinationals. They have to meet the highest international standards, stringent quality assurance and competitive challenges, while labour shortages and rising energy costs make it difficult to run production lines and logistics systems efficiently. For complex systems, IT can provide solutions that can significantly improve competitiveness.

“Domestic companies need to develop digitalisation to a higher level for effective collaboration with customers. This will provide them with detailed information about their own activities: raw material requirements per unit of product manufactured, production steps and times, labour requirements, transport and even packaging,” emphasised Péter Gém, Sales Director for Large Industrial Enterprises at 4iG Plc. “The same is true for energy efficiency. It is no longer enough to monitor the operating temperature with sensors. Based on the conclusions drawn from the aggregated, visualised data, it is worthwhile to implement solutions to increase efficiency, but environmental protection and the reduction of the carbon footprint also require the most professional energy management and digital optimisation of resources,” added Péter Gém.

“In the past, system and process improvements that increased production volumes were more popular. Today, customers are interested in solutions to labour shortages and energy efficiency,” points out Gabriella Steiner, Senior Industrial Large Corporate Contact at 4iG Plc. According to 4iG experts, companies often only want to upgrade to the extent necessary to “keep up” with minimum international standards. However, when problems and opportunities are verbally explored in advance, the need for further meaningful digitisation steps typically emerges. Further opportunities and new technological innovations can be added later in the development plan to further improve the company’s efficiency. “For example, the need for artificial intelligence (AI), which is increasingly used in industrial companies, typically arises later. However, in order to use it, sufficient system data must be available, which is essential for AI to learn, draw conclusions and be integrated into management processes,” stressed Gabriella Steiner.

There are significant differences in the level of digital maturity in Hungary, with many still at the beginning of the development process. Therefore, 4iG’s team of experts define their work not as a sales job, but as a complex consultancy task.⁣ “In some cases, they keep track of parts inventories or production processes in Excel spreadsheets, while in others we outline measures to improve plant efficiency after understanding the details of their own operations,”⁣⁣ adds Zoltán Hoffer, an industrial automation and digitalisation expert at 4iG Plc. In order to build a modern automation environment, it is worth looking for an integration partner that offers customised yet affordable packages, rather than pre-packaged “ready-made” products, says Péter Gém, adding that “with our expertise and experience, we understand and plan the necessary steps, building on the various software and hardware foundations to propose solutions that increase efficiency”.

The expert team of Gabriella Steiner, Zoltán Hoffer and Péter Gém helps 4iG customers with efficient solutions. AGILOX’s self-propelled forklift system can prepare for the next day’s production and delivery processes during the night, the “robotic” shift, without the need for human control, not to mention lighting and heating.