The 38th Motek international trade fair for automation in production and assembly, together with the 13th Bondexpo international trade fair for bonding technologies, came to a successful conclusion on Thursday evening. A total of 976 exhibitors from 32 countries journeyed to Stuttgart to present innovations from the fields of production and assembly automation, as well as joining and fastening. This year’s highlight was the integrative theme park called Arena of Integration (AoI) in hall 6: on the basis of 29 interconnected use cases, 36 participating companies provided concrete answers to current questions regarding intelligent production and process sequences in combination with digital applications.
Connectivity in Actual Practice: Enthusiasm Right from the Start
“The internationally leading Motek trade fair at the heart of the mid-sized business sector is the right place at the right time for the Arena of Integration to present networked Industry 4.0 in a practical, hands-on manner,” says Senator E.h. Wolfgang Wolf, Managing Director of the Board of the State Association of Industry in Baden-Württemberg (LVI). Right from the very start, he was enthusiastic about this “brilliant, highly topical idea”, and demonstrated great interest during his tour of the AoI manufacturing cells at the trade fair. And without a doubt, trade fair promoters P. E. Schall GmbH & Co. KG, in cooperation with the Mechatronics Network of Baden-Württemberg, have set a milestone with AoI and have pointed out the direction in which industrial manufacturing processes are headed: digitalisation necessitates networking, holistic engineering and cooperative project implementation.
Innovative Approach in the Right Place at the Right Time
“The Arena of Integration is the best example of the fact that German technology companies are above all global leaders when they connect and team up with each other. What we’re experiencing at the Arena isn’t merely a unique and innovative approach to trade fair design. At the same time it’s the key to how Germany’s mid-sized “hidden champions” will be able to position themselves internationally in the future. Trade fair promoters P. E. Schall GmbH & Co. KG not only recognised the opportunity in a notable manner, but also actively seized upon it with the Arena of Integration,” explained Thomas Bonschab, managing director of TiNC International GmbH and board member of the German Society for International Technology Transfer (DGIT).
Opportunity Recognised, Extraordinary Network Created, Complementary Expertise Exploited
Heldele Automation GmbH from Salach, Germany, came to Motek this year as an exhibitor specifically for the reason that the AoI had been launched. “This cooperation is based on a solid foundation,” noted managing director David Pietsch. Gerald Loser, head of sales and personnel development at Heldele Mechatronik GmbH in Lenningen, was “genuinely and favourably surprised by the targeted queries” fielded at the various stations of the AoI: “Customers arrived here with concrete RFQs.” Philipp Echteler, responsible for digitalisation and the IIoT at Balluff GmbH, was also very pleased: “The network here is great. Everybody’s raring to go!”
Business, Associations, Politics: “Everybody’s Raring to Go!”
Within the framework of Motek, the AoI was already attracting attention well in advance of the trade fair, so that numerous personalities from politics and business scheduled visits in their calendars. A delegation from the Ministry of Economics of the State of Baden-Württemberg personally examined the AoI on Thursday as well. “The arena is a highly beneficial platform for linking up the various players with one another,” she said during her tour.
Thomas Kathöfer, Managing Director of the Consortium of Industrial Research Associations (AiF) which, in close cooperation with the BMWi, is responsible for the Joint Industrial Research Society (IGF) and the Central Innovation Programme for Small and Mid-Sized Enterprises (ZIM), concisely summed up his impression of the AoI as follows: “The Arena is a genuine bull’s-eye!” It’s a highly promising format for addressing the multifaceted challenges of digitalising business processes. “In a highly convincing manner, it demonstrates that smart networking of promising solution concepts involving players with complementary expertise is the ideal path to successful innovation.”
And this is the path that Motek is pursuing: Smart Solutions for Production and Assembly! Not least of all thanks to the AoI concept, the world’s leading trade fair for automation in production and assembly has set a milestone this year. Representatives from companies, associations, business and politics visited the trade fair and the theme park – a summary of their statements and quotations can be found at www.arena-of-integration.de/en/areas-of-competence/.
AoI Attracts International Attention
Several foreign delegations, including visitors from faraway Brazil, sought answers to questions about modern, future-oriented production processes during their tour of the AoI. A group from Turkey with representatives from industry and training institutes had become aware of the theme park via the AoI website, and travelled to Stuttgart to attend Motek especially for this purpose. Amongst other things, they were interested in the efficient use of energy and resources in production. The guests summed up the benefits as follows: “Highly practical networking of various topics and realistic process flows which can’t be found anywhere else in such an all-embracing format are presented here to the expert visitors.”
Numerous Innovations Exhibited at Motek/Bondexpo
The exhibitors at the Motek/Bondexpo trade fair duo unveiled lots of brand-new innovations to their expert visitors: from laboratory conveyor belts for LED UV applications right on up to new linear motor concepts, machine vision systems, gripper concepts, screwing technologies and new cobots. The trade fair concept once again verified that Motek is the industry event for automation in production and assembly. No other trade fair in the world provides expert visitors with such a comprehensive overview of issues in the field of rapidly changing process automation. Professor Bernd Mayer from the Fraunhofer Institute IFAM in Bremen, who have been amongst the exhibitors for 13 years and make use of Motek/Bondexpo as a perfectly matched platform, emphasised the fact that digitalisation, and thus the resulting changes in bonding technology as well, are also “of extremely high relevance”.
A Brimming-Full, World-Class Supplementary Program
With the expert forum for Safety and Automation, the Exhibitor Forum, the VDI Forum and the presentation programme at the Arena of Communication (AoC) as an extended communication format for the AoI, Motek/Bondexpo provided expert visitors with excellent opportunities for gathering first-hand, up-to-date knowledge and expertise and engaging in a direct professional exchange with the speakers and the experts. Once again this year, the ceremonial presentation of the handling award found an adequate setting for paying appropriate tribute to the prize-winners at Motek.
Well-Received Service for Expert Visitors: Lounges
Traditionally, Motek/Bondexpo is a user-oriented “working trade fair”. 35,165 satisfied expert visitors breathed life into the six exhibition halls over a period of four days. Once again this year, the trade fair promoters created an ideal business atmosphere for the exhibitors as well as the expert visitors. With four lounges at the outskirts of each hall including workstations, espresso bars, refreshment zones and quiet zones, appropriately equipped areas were made available, which all were welcome to make use of: electrical power, Internet, coffee, water or just a quiet place to sit – that’s hospitality.
Motek 2020 Smart Solutions for Production and Assembly
As an internationally recognised information, communication and business platform, Motek reflects dynamically changing industrial production technology. Expert visitors find answers to the questions they’re grappling with on their way to the smart factory in the highly practical atmosphere at the event. Nowhere else are technical trade fair visitors from the field of industrial manufacturing able to gain a comparably extensive overview of how the modern production process has to be set up as an overall system within the framework of ongoing, consistent digitalisation of automation functions in order to become and remain economically efficient and competitive. The well-tried, successful trade fair concept will be continued in 2020: the next Motek/Bondexpo industry event, flanked by the AoI theme park, will take place from the 5th through the 8th of October, 2020.