Bosch and Busch-Jaeger are the winners of this year's Industry 4.0 Awards. Since 2013 ROI-EFESO has been awarding outstanding digitization projects in the field of manufacturing. The focus of this year's competition was on Smart Factory and Smart Supply Chain solutions.

Bosch won over the members of the top-class jury of experts with its approach to make artificial intelligence usable for a wide range of manufacturing processes. At the company's location in Immenstadt, Germany, the manufacturer of electronic components for the automotive industry developed a highly scalable IoT architecture that can be used to make process and product data available more quickly for machine learning applications in various areas.

Busch-Jaeger, a manufacturer smart home applications, laid the foundation for the production of customized KNX sensors with batch size 1 by end-to-end digitization of its entire supply chain processes at its plant in Lüdenscheid. This transformation from an anonymous warehouse fabricator to a manufacturer of customized products was rewarded by the jury with the award in the category Smart Supply Chain.

Overarching trends in this year's competition were the flexibilization and increasing scalability of Industry 4.0 solutions. "We experience that Industry 4.0 projects are increasingly moving from local initiatives to company-wide efficiency levers" explains Hans-Georg Scheibe, Managing Partner at ROI-EFESO." Real Industry 4.0 champions therefore rely on scalable data architectures so that their solutions are not only deployed point by point, but can be used across processes and locations".