Sector CEO Hiesinger Shares Siemens’ Global Perspective
“We provide solutions to assist our customers with the very real challenges they face,” began Dr. Heinrich Hiesinger, CEO of Siemens’ Industry Sector business and member of the Siemens Board of Directors.

Hiesinger was in Chicago July 21 for the U.S. debut of exiderdome, Siemens’ traveling technology expo. On display in conjunction with the Siemens Automation Summit and Users Conference, exiderdome this week begins a nine-city tour of industrial centers across the United States.

The Industry Sector business, which Hiesinger leads, is a product of a wide-ranging reorganization earlier this year that produced substantial changes in the way Siemens is run. “We were very much a rules-based organization,” Hiesinger said. The new structure was intended to create a more flexible and productive Siemens, where opportunities rather than hard and fast rules, drive the company, Hiesinger added.

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“We believe the Industry Sector can grow at 2x GDP.” Heinrich Hiesinger, CEO of Siemens’ Industry Sector, is bullish on his unit’s ability to grow at twice the rate of the overall global economy.

U.S. Market Leadership Is Key to Siemens Growth
“We understand customer needs,” said Dennis Sadlowski, CEO of Siemens Energy & Automation, on the reasons for Siemens’ growing success in the North American industrial market. “We use our channels and our customers to help us 'Think Customer.' That’s our culture. We are in the business of making our customers more productive and more competitive.”

Sadlowski addressed a cadre of international journalists gathered to mark the U.S. debut of the company’s exiderdome traveling expo. “We have 10,000 employees in the U.S. and an additional 2,000 in Mexico. We’re based in Alpharetta, Georgia, with 160 sales and support locations in North America. We have eight R&D facilities, and we go to market with more than 3,000 distributors. We provide solutions,” he said, “in industrial automation, drive technologies, industrial solutions, building automation and mobility.”

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“Our customers’ success begets our success.” Siemens E&A President and CEO Dennis Sadlowski discussed the company’s growth plans in North America, where revenues already have doubled since 2004.

User Advisory Boards Benefit Both Parties
Applied Engineering Solutions’ Bruce Slade, co-chair of Siemens’ User Advisory Board, discusses the mutual benefits of participating in the User Advisory Board--to end-user companies, to Siemens and to one's individual career. Walt Boyes, editor-in-chief of Control, caught up with Slade in Chicago during the 2008 Siemens Automation Summit.

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Chicago’s Navy Pier Welcomes Siemens exiderdome

Built and transported on a specially built barge for the first part of its nine-city tour, exiderdome will be open to visitors in Chicago through July 24 as the visually unique centerpiece of Siemens’ 2008 Automation Summit, being held at Navy Pier from Tuesday through Thursday.

“The United States is Siemens’ largest market, and our roots run deep in the Chicago area, where we have been operating for nearly 120 years,” said Heinrich Hiesinger, CEO of Siemens Industry Sector, addressing the assembled guests. “Combined with its proximity to our customers, Chicago ranks as one of the top areas for potential market growth and is the ideal place to launch our U.S. tour.”

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The exiderdome’s Global Tour
Before arriving in Chicago, exiderdome toured much of Asia and continues to work its way eastward. In this three-minute video see highlights of its past two years of touring, plus how it all comes together from 55 individual shipping containers.

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Users Learn to Unify Data with One-Stop Simatic IT XHQ
A place for everything and everything in its place. This good advice from Mom hasn’t always made it through to manufacturing operations, and even less so to their many diverse and traditionally disjointed data processing systems.

To combat this confusion and give operators and managers a unified view of their operations and performance, some developers are trying to gather these data sources together and present them in a unified format that’s closer to real time. One of the most significant of these efforts is Siemens Energy & Automation’s Simatic IT XHQ operations intelligence (OI) software.

To show users how Simatic IT XHQ works and give them some much-needed education about it, Siemens offered a one-day “Operations Intelligence” pre-conference training course a day before the opening of the 2008 Siemens Automation Summit this week at Navy Pier in Chicago. The daylong training session was presented by Ibrahim El-Sayed of Siemens E&A’s pre-sales product consulting and solutions division.

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“The value of operations intelligence is only realized when users take action based on better information.” Siemens’ Ibrahim El-Sayed walked Automation Summit attendees through how the company’s XHQ application can be used to build dashboards and other visualization tools.

Profinet Spoken on the Plant Floor
Configuration was the name of the game at “Ethernet on the Plant Floor,” one of the pre-event technical hands-on workshops at the 2008 Siemens Automation Summit. Siemens’ Stefan Sattler, Profinet marketing manager, and Tim Hurtt, automation applications engineer, walked participants through a detailed configuration of demonstration equipment using STEP 7, along with a PN OPC server and Simatic WinCC flexible HMI software.

“Ethernet is just the wire,” explained Sattler. “Profinet is the protocol. Profinet is an open solution. If you want to exchange data fast, you need a fast protocol. Profinet gives complete control of the manufacturing processes.”

Because of increased demand for information and reporting, network developers arrive at unique challenges, said Sattler. “At the administrative level, they want maximum visibility of the other areas, so they can see the data, and it can be forwarded,” he said. “But below the administrative area, we have things we need to accomplish.

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“At the administrative level, they want maximum visibility so they can see the data. But below the administrative level, we have things we need to accomplish.”