Hannover Messe 2022: Empowering people for the future in manufacturing

After more than three years, we were excited to join global leaders and our manufacturing colleagues in Hannover, Germany at the world’s biggest trade show for industrial technology, Hannover Messe 2022.  

Since we last met, Microsoft has released new solutions and capabilities to help our customers and partners thrive through this disruptive era. Most notably we announced Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, which brings together our manufacturing capabilities on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform to help organizations across industries accelerate COVID-19 recovery and create operational resiliency.  

At the Microsoft Booth in Hall 4 Stand E34, we showed how Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability brings the best outcome-driven solutions and capabilities from Microsoft and our partners to accelerate time-to-value for our customers. 

Read Caglayan Arkan’s blog, Innovating for the future: Top four trends at Hannover Messe, for a broader recap of the partners who joined us at Hannover Messe 2022, our key product announcements, and hot trends.  

Empowering people for what’s next in manufacturing

As a gray-haired manufacturing veteran who has been grappling with the industry’s skills gap and the appropriate role that technology should play in addressing it, I’m gratified that during Hannover Messe 2022, the meetings, the conversations, the showcases that attracted the most traffic on the Microsoft booth—and at other exhibitors—weren’t autonomous systems that eliminate people. It was the showcases that augmented, upskilled, or reskilled people, combining people, processes, and technology.  

A lot has changed since we last met at Hannover Messe in 2019, where I reflected on the opportunity to address the manufacturing skills gap by augmenting human intelligence. Amongst the manufacturing community that attended Hannover Messe 2022—and beyond—there’s a new awareness of the impact of responsible manufacturing, its massive impact on our daily lives, and on sustainability. Through Microsoft’s mission of empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, we can help manufacturers and their workforce create a more resilient and sustainable future for us all.

People, processes, and technology at Hannover Messe 2022

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing capabilities and solutions fulfill our mission of empowering people:

• Helping manufacturers increase asset and frontline worker productivity in safe and secure factories.
• Planners, schedulers, and expediters to create resilient supply chains.
• Sales representatives to sell remotely.
• Service technicians to deliver always-on service.
• Engineers to unlock cloud-based innovation.

If you couldn’t join us at Hannover Messe, please make sure you read Emma Williams’s blog, How Microsoft is equipping manufacturing workers with the tools of the future, with some great customer stories:

• Johnson Controls leveraged Microsoft Teams and Power Platform to build and deploy a set of applications they call Power Smart Factory to help streamline frontline operations and improve factory operations. Learn how their solution helped optimize workloads, reduce machine downtime, improve product and service quality, and save money.

• Manufacturers like Blum are leveraging tools like Microsoft Viva Connections and Microsoft Teams to promote employee culture while optimizing for the factory of the future. Learn how Blum created a customized employee experience app for their frontline workforce with Viva Connections.

One of the most popular showcases at the Microsoft Booth showed how Kawasaki Heavy Industries, one of the world’s leading robotics companies, is exploring with Microsoft how the ‘Industrial Metaverse’ could allow engineers, service technicians, and frontline workers to work together in the factory of the future utilizing IoT, digital twins, mixed reality, and collaborative spaces like Mesh for Microsoft Teams. 

And while all the winners of the “Oscar for the manufacturing industry”—the Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award (MIMA)—are worthy winners in their category, I’d highlight Bosch’s Digital Twin that “takes human-machine collaboration to the next level” as the one that builds on this theme.

WomenPower at Hannover Messe 2022

We were delighted to host a session at the WomenPower event on June 2, Hannover Messe’s 19 Career Congress designed to offer a platform for topics around diversity, equality, sustainability, and career development. In this session, female leaders from Microsoft and the manufacturing sector gave their perspectives on how digitalization and sustainability are transforming the industry, both creating a need for new talent and an opportunity for female leaders who want to make a mark on the sector. In this lively panel discussion, manufacturing was defined as THE industry to work in to see a real and immediate impact from initiatives around sustainability and digitalization. The need for further work on diversity and inclusion was clear for all, as well as its importance for better business outcomes. In their closing remarks, the speakers reflected on what had helped them on their personal career journeys, and shared some advice with the audience, from being prepared to take risks and go outside their comfort zone, to finding their voice and taking their seat at the table. Our thanks for an inspirational panel go to:

• Dr. Paula Doyle, Senior Vice President, Energy, Cognite AS.
• Katarina Heining, Head of Digital Sales and Marketing, DMG MORI Digital.
• Laurence Janssens, Head of Manufacturing Industry, Microsoft Western Europe.
• Dr. Antigoni Chrysostomou, EMEA Business Leader, Azure HPC and AI, Microsoft Germany.
• Dr. Zoubida El Hachemi, Global Director, Strategic Partnerships, Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence.
• Merce Borrull, Channel Sales Executive, Microsoft Switzerland.

Read Laurence Janssen’s blogs for more on why manufacturing is the place to be for diverse talent, and interviews with some of the panelists.  

A lot has changed since we last met at Hannover Messe in 2019. For this gray-haired manufacturing veteran who has been grappling with the industry’s skills gap, Hannover Messe 2022 was really about empowering people for the future of manufacturing.

Stay informed

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