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Feeding the digital twin: The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance inte­grates ECLASS as a new stan­dard

Alliance members and end customers advance their Industry 4.0 initia­tives with ECLASS

Reinach, Schweiz, 22.11.2022 – The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance is coop­er­ating with ECLASS to adapt the only glob­ally used and ISO/IEC-non-compliant refer­ence data stan­dard for the clas­si­fi­ca­tion and unique descrip­tion of prod­ucts and services. Through ECLASS, product master data can be exchanged digi­tally across all borders. This is a stan­dard that is already estab­lished in the indus­trial, retail and service sectors and is driving Industry 4.0 initia­tives. As part of the part­ner­ship, the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance will rely on the ECLASS stan­dard to provide the basis for IIoT and Industry 4.0 assets and to further expand the inno­va­tion capa­bil­i­ties of its members and their end users for the future.

 

When manu­ally trans­fer­ring data from one IT system to another, the use of a stan­dard that is not compre­hen­sive and inter­op­er­able can cause fric­tion. The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance wants to prevent this by adapting the ECLASS, providing a unified cross-industry stan­dard. Currently, ECLASS includes about 45,000 product classes and over 19,000 unique char­ac­ter­is­tics that can be cate­go­rized into four levels. This allows each product and service to be repre­sented by an eight digit code. Features, such as supplier name, type or manu­fac­turer desig­na­tion, can be contained in addi­tional, machine-read­able iden­ti­fiers.

“Our coop­er­a­tion with the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance supports compa­nies in the field to repre­sent their product descrip­tions digi­tally and imple­ment Industry 4.0 initia­tives,” says Thorsten Kroke, Managing Director at ECLASS e.V. “ECLASS is the semantic stan­dard for digital product illus­tra­tions and services of the Euro­pean industry. Compa­nies can – in coop­er­a­tion with part­ners like the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance – use our stan­dard as an impor­tant building block in creating a complete repre­sen­ta­tion of a digi­taltwin.”

“The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance relies on the inte­gra­tion of existing market stan­dards for its members and end customers. ECLASS is partic­u­larly well suited to exem­plify such inte­gra­tions,” said Ricardo Dunkel, Tech­nical Director at Open Industry 4.0 Alliance. “We are taking this stan­dard and inte­grating it into our refer­ence archi­tec­ture and imple­men­ta­tion approach, allowing the manage­ment shell to bring the digital twin to life – and subse­quently find its way into the produc­tion floors of our members and end users.”

A video about the coop­er­a­tion between ECLASS and the Open Industry Alliance is avail­able here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYwsAn8dPZk

 

Photo mate­rial:

Ricardo Dunkel, Tech­nical Director at Open Industry 4.0 Alliance, wants to bring Digital Twins to life with ECLASS

© Open Industry 4.0 Alliance

 

About ECLASS e.V.

ECLASS e.V. was founded on November 14, 2000 by 12 major compa­nies of the German industry. By 2020, the asso­ci­a­tion had around 150 members world­wide from busi­ness, asso­ci­a­tions and public insti­tu­tions. Funda­mental to elec­tronic procure­ment of services — just as with mate­rial prod­ucts — is a stan­dard for the exchange of infor­ma­tion between suppliers and customers. ECLASS e.V. is a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion that defines, develops and dissem­i­nates the clas­si­fi­ca­tion and master data stan­dard of the same name inter­na­tion­ally across all indus­tries.

More infor­ma­tion here: https://eclass.eu/