Green Manufacturing: Scm Group

GEM23 - Green Ex Machina, the first Italian Think Tank created to share ideas, research projects and strategies on green manufacturing, was born. Scm Group is among the opinion leaders involved and brings to the table its expertise and experience in the fields of sustainability and digital transformation.

How does technology make production processes sustainable and how can it contribute to the circular economy? What role do Big Data play? And what role does servitisation play in all this? These topics were discussed on 12 April at Green Ex Machina's first public event at the Banco BPM Headquarters in Milan with the Gem23 project's protagonists and a large audience of entrepreneurs, R&D managers and industry representatives. Among the speakers was also Eloisa Carlini, Quality and Sustainability Director of Scm Group, who emphasised how technologies, as well as human skills, play a key role in the sustainability of production processes.

In defining a green manufacturing path, Eloisa Carlini started from the experience gained by the Group leader in technologies for processing wood, composite materials, plastic, glass, stone and metal. The environmental impact of machines is above all linked to their use, and Scm Group has been implementing for years an innovation strategy that aims to make machines more efficient, to reduce energy consumption up to recovering the energy spent in some applications, to minimise material waste, and to facilitate manual operations.

Remote diagnostics and remote assistance have a strong impact on the sustainability of processes. "The evolution of sensor technology, intelligent components and the possibility of connecting machines with IOT solutions have brought many advantages for the customer, who can assess in real time the productivity of his machines, monitor working parameters, improve performance, plan maintenance operations, order spare parts and much more".

The advantages, adds Carlini, are also for machine manufacturers who can assist customers more efficiently. In addition, "with digital technologies we can help to extend the life cycle of the asset itself because we can do advisory activities such as alerting the customer in advance of anomalies arising, providing indications to reduce consumption."

Of course, managing digital technologies requires new skills and specific mindsets.

“Since the most diverse work cycles can be carried out with our machines, on parts of shapes and materials each time different - Carlini concludes - we cannot think of relying only on artificial intelligence, which learns from the past to propose behaviour. Artificial intelligence must be flanked by knowledge of the physical domain that only our human resources can have. The machine today cannot be completely autonomous: we need the skills of human capital”.