Siemens AG, Germany-based engineering behemoth, will build a high-tech electronics demonstration plant together with South Korean industrial equipment maker Hyundai Wia Corp. in Korea in hopes of setting standards for the future manufacturing system mainly controlled by the Internet of Things and big data in one of the world’s most wired countries.

"Korea doesn’t have smart factories that could match Siemens’s electronics plants in Amberg, Germany and Chengdu, China that are praised as the best smart plants in the world,” Kim jong-kap, chairman and chief executive officer of Siemens Ltd., Korean unit of Siemens, said in an exclusive interview with Maeil Business Newspaper on Thursday. The two companies aim to build a smart demonstration plant in Ansan in Gyeonggi Province, Korea by 2018 and showcase the future of manufacturing plant that fully incorporates the Internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence systems, added Kim. A demonstration plant is type of pilot plant, but larger in scale, to demonstrate an automated manufacturing system before commercialization.

On top of Siemens and Hyundai Wia, Germany’s leading pneumatic and mechanical components manufacturer Festo AG and industrial robot maker KUKA AG will join the team of Korean and German experts in electrical and robotics engineering to build the so-called smart factory in Korea.

“The goal is to give an idea of what the future manufacturing system should look like by introducing the world’s best software and equipment in Ansan,” said Kim. The company is preparing with a four-year plant operation plan, and the Ansan plant will be run as a test bed for local companies to learn and expand their capabilities to apply the smart factory system, and not to generate profits by manufacturing products, explained an unnamed Siemens official.

Siemens is known to have the best technology on smart manufacturing plant in the world. Its plants in Amberg and Chengdu are considered as the next-generation manufacturing plant by maximizing productivity and customizing production through employing the Internet of Things and big data, industry observers say. The firm produces one programmable logic controller, a chip that is considered as the brain for industrial robots, per every 10 seconds but the defect rates is only 0.001 percent, or 9.5 defective units per every 1 million chips made. Its productivity is about 40 times higher than its rivals with their average defect rates standing between 0.03 percent and 0.04 percent.

By Kim Jung-hwan

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