Annual General Assembly of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance: Well-Posi­tioned for the Coming Year 2024

The current members of the Exec­u­tive Board of Allianz (from left to right: Ekrem Yigitdöl, Hans-Jürgen Huber, Chris­tian Liedtke and Jan-Rémi Fromentin) © Open Industry 4.0 Alliance

Conti­nuity at the fore­front: At its Annual General Assembly, the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance set its course for the coming year. Jan-Rémi Fromentin replaces Thomas May as a member of the Board of Direc­tors, while the rest of the Board and manage­ment of work­groups remains unchanged. Thomas May (ifm elec­tronic GmbH) is retiring and Jan-Rémi Fromentin (ifm France) is taking over the baton, bene­fiting the Alliance with its first inter­na­tional board member. The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance – founded in 2019 – at the Hannover Messe and devel­oped into a strictly prac­tice-oriented commu­nity for the digi­tal­i­sa­tion of industry with currently 109 members. 

The year 2023 is coming to an eventful end. The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance was repre­sented at numerous trade fairs in Germany and Europe: SPS in Italy and Germany, DIRA and HiTech in Denmark and Hannover Messe. Addi­tion­ally, the Alliance also attended numerous other events such as the Knowl­edge Camp at Multivac and the All Members Conven­tion. Since the last Annual General Meeting, the alliance has grown to include addi­tional members including WiBu Systems, Boehringer Ingel­heim, Endian and conple­ment. 

“For us, the focus in 2024 is on conti­nuity and consis­tency. We also want to further expand our profes­sional struc­tures so we can continue to develop,” explains Dr Chris­tian Liedtke, Spokesman of the Board for the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance. 

In addi­tion to ongoing inter­na­tion­al­i­sa­tion, the Alliance is contin­uing to inten­sify its collab­o­ra­tions with German govern­ment organ­i­sa­tions, asso­ci­a­tions and feder­a­tions, such as its coop­er­a­tion with IDTA. A new inter­na­tional coop­er­a­tion agree­ment was also concluded with the Digital Twin Consor­tium (DTC) in the USA in 2023. 

Inter­na­tion­al­i­sa­tion has also arrived at board level with Jan-Rémi Fromentin, the first member from Europe. “As a new member of the OI4 board, my aim is to strengthen ifm’s contri­bu­tion – with the help of other ifm colleagues – in various working groups in order to achieve a certain degree of coor­di­na­tion between our own product devel­op­ment at ifm and the ongoing stan­dard­i­s­a­tion work of the OI4,” says Jan-Rémi Fromentin, board member of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance. “On a global level, I would like to contribute to the success of the OI4 as a leading organ­i­sa­tion in the field of Industry 4.0, help with the imple­men­ta­tion of I4.0 stan­dards, the vertical and hori­zontal inte­gra­tion of data and processes and be able to make knowl­edge, refer­ence archi­tec­tures and guide­lines avail­able to all members equally.” 

A number of high profile projects including four hackathons, “Follow the Twin Chal­lenge” at the SPS, Digital Product Pass­port and opening of the flag­ship store for the OI4 commu­nity by Alliance member Hilscher show how strongly the Alliance remains rooted in its DNA as an imple­men­ta­tion alliance of prac­ti­tioners. 

The Annual General Assembly of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance took place on 8 December 2023 in Augs­burg, hosted by KUKA. 

About the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance: 

The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance acts as a part­ner­ship asso­ci­a­tion of leading indus­trial compa­nies that prag­mat­i­cally partic­i­pate in the imple­men­ta­tion of cross-vendor industry 4.0 solu­tions and services for manu­fac­turing plants and auto­mated ware­houses. In industry and tech­nology working groups, industry experts develop, use cases, and imple­ment them tech­ni­cally based on the OI4 refer­ence archi­tec­ture. These solu­tions, along with imple­men­ta­tion guides, are shared within the commu­nity and made avail­able outside the Alliance. The Alliance was launched in April 2019. The seat of the asso­ci­a­tion is Reinach, Switzer­land.