Annual General Assembly
of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance:
Well positioned for the coming year 2024
- Continuity of the Alliance is ensured
- Jan-Rémi Fromentin succeeds Thomas May as a member of the Executive Board
Reinach, Switzerland, xx/xx/2023 – 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 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
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.
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