Siemens engineers Vietnam’s digital future
Siemens engineers Vietnam’s digital future
Digitalisation is changing production methods the world over and will have a significant impact on industrialisation in Vietnam. Siemens Vietnam’s president and chief executive officer Pham Thai Lai spoke to VIR’s Thanh Tung about how the process will shape the country’s future.
How is Siemens making progress in the area of digitalisation?
For Siemens, digitalisation is much more than a business field. It’s our biggest growth driver, with which we intend to lead the company to a successful future. With our broad range of offerings along the automation and electrification value chain combined with our IT expertise, we’re ideally positioned for the era of digitalisation and to participate in market growth.
For example, our industrial data analytics platform is an excellent example of how digitalisation can benefit our customers. It can be used to develop data-driven services. All these together ensure higher availability and reliability in the system than with traditional maintenance contracts thus helping the customers to minimise and optimise the downtime of their power plants.
Will Vietnam be able to benefit from Siemens’ investment in digitalisation?
I am very confident that this will be the case. Today, vertical software has already been introduced in Vietnam through a number of key customers such as Samsung, Canon, Nike and Cho Ray hospital. For instance, Syngo.via is helping the radiology department of the Cho Ray hospital to optimise clinical workflow in imaging diagnostics, resulting in much higher patient throughput and improved quality with the same resources. This is of utmost importance for emerging countries like Vietnam with a limited number of trained medical personnel and constrained budgets, allowing them to optimally utilise available skilled resources. Notably, we are also focusing in realising Industry 4.0, also known as digital factories, where virtual worlds merge with real production to create competitive advantages for our customers. The Siemens Electronics Factory in Amberg, Germany and its sister factory in Chengdu, China are among the most advanced electronics plants in the world and are the best examples of digital enterprise. Vietnamese customers are very welcome to try our digital factory offerings, which significantly help reduce time to market by increasing productivity and flexibility.
What is “Industry 4.0”?
Industry 4.0 is a concept developed by the German government for the automation industry in Germany. It signifies the latest industrial revolution. The real and virtual worlds are now beginning to merge in production, which is why we’re talking about Industry 4.0. The goal is to develop a forward-looking strategy which prepares the German manufacturing industry for the internet age. As a result of Industry 4.0, in the future, billions of machines, systems, and sensors worldwide will communicate directly with each other and share information.
So what digital technology trends do you think will be dominant in the decades ahead in Vietnam?
Digitalisation is a mega-trend, already affecting various industries and markets today. In fact it already affects our daily life and has created completely new business models. Just think about Amazon, Facebook, Google, Uber, and Spotify, which have entirely re-defined our way of communicating and interacting. Digitalisation will evolve also in the manufacturing industry and significantly change the method of production. This will create greater efficiency resulting in higher quality and productivity.
What can Vietnam do as a country to develop a sturdy digital technology industry?
Changes must be based on progressive evolution, commencing with small pilot projects implemented step-by-step in reasonable doses which can be implemented without harming conventional plant operations. Siemens aims to support customers, no matter their starting point, to identify barriers and provide solutions for streamlining “shop-floor” to “top-floor” operations and communication. The first step is to ensure production data transparency before going further on the journey of digitalisation.
Vietnam also needs to invest in educating skilled IT specialists, who are the key pre-requisite for growing the IT industry and for attracting foreign investment to Vietnam. Vietnam has a great chance to become a centre of competence in IT within the ASEAN region.
