26 n SOFTWARE-BASED AUTOMATION November/December 2025 www.drivesncontrols.com The next industrial revolution will be written in software Manufacturing is at a crossroads. Robotics and predictive maintenance tools are more accessible than ever, yet many factories remain locked into hardwaredefined operations – rigid, fragmented and vulnerable when supply chains falter. Across the world, manufacturing is being impacted by four major forces: deglobalisation, decarbonisation, demographic change, and digitalisation. We’re seeing a shift to a less connected world, where interdependence between countries is reduced, driven by the need for supply chain resilience amid economic and political events affecting global production. A push for greener production is also influencing the industry as natural resources become scarcer. The concept of a circular economy has gone beyond a “nice-to-have”; it’s become strategically necessary for companies wanting to gain a competitive edge through resource efficiency. Meanwhile, the demographic of manufacturing workforces is changing dramatically around the world. Older, experienced workers are retiring, and fewer young people are entering the industry, leaving large, often specialised skills gaps. At SEW-Eurodrive, we’re expecting 35–50% of our current manufacturing workforce to retire in the coming decade, and are actively taking steps to address this. We’re shaping our automation strategy around the reality of this impending change, designing our systems to ensure that fewer people can manage greater complexity. Having plug-and-play capabilities removes the need for operators to have advanced technical knowledge of multiple systems and increases efficiency and productivity while reducing the skills gap as older workers retire. As more factories make this move to smarter production, digitalisation delivers efficiency by doing more in less time, at a lower cost, and with fewer people. The technologies being introduced to the factory floor shouldn’t be too convoluted though. “Smart” tools that complicate basic tasks can fail rapidly. We need digitalisation to deliver measurable benefits, not just new features. If your factory runs on hardware, your strategy’s already outdated. As we reach past Industry 4.0 and into Industry 5.0 and beyond, it’s time for manufacturers to let go of hardware-driven legacy systems and reap the benefits that data-driven digitalisation can offer. Research* from the software firm iBASEt, supported by the Manufacturing Technology Centre, shows that machinery manufacturing remains among the least digitally mature industries in the UK and US, offering the prime opportunity for transformation to take place. However, a core limitation for the manufacturing world is that most existing factories are hardware-defined, remaining overly-reliant on physical components for control, and still being far away from becoming fully digital. If manufacturers really want to establish themselves as innovators and leaders over the next decade or so, they need to start the switch to software-defined factories and automation. These factories are highly flexible and adaptable production environments, using a software layer-based approach to control and optimise production, rather than relying on dedicated hardware. When building these factory floors, their layout, control and optimisation need to be driven by software from the outset, thus enabling real-time simulation, rapid configuration and higher productivity. Hand-in-hand with this comes softwaredefined automation, a key technological component that focuses on creating systems that make people more effective by allowing access to automation through a single, easyto-use interface, regardless of which hardware supplier is used. This brings us back to the strategy we’re adopting at SEW-Eurodrive. We’re simplifying tasks to minimise deployment time and reduce lengthy training periods, lessening the effect of skills shortages. We are freeing our engineers to work on innovation rather than troubleshooting, helping us in our push for higher productivity both for our own factories, and for the production sites of our customers. The transformational wave doesn’t stop there though. The next wave – already taking root in China – is to use AI agents that optimise processes automatically in fully digital factories. AI is the ultimate productivity multiplier, boosting efficiency and unlocking new capabilities previously out of reach. To keep pace with leaders across the world, UK manufacturers must act now: embracing software-defined automation as the foundation for efficiency, adaptability and long-term growth. n * Digital Manufacturing Productivity Report (2022): https://info.ibaset.com/en-gb/digitalmanufacturing-report Factories can’t compete on hardware alone anymore, argues Dr Hans Krattenmacher, chief innovation officer at SEW-Eurodrive. He explains why the next wave of manufacturing competitiveness will depend less on hardware and more on the intelligent software that drives it. Software-defined automation creates systems that make people more effective
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjQ0NzM=