The entire ‘sheet metal process chain’ – from ordering of a sheet metal part to its design, production and delivery – is intelligently interlinked, in accordance with latest thinking. Rather than focus on individual machines, as does a normal showroom, the Chicago plant will focus on the entire customer process, complete with material and information flow.
Covering an area of roughly 5,500 m2 and scheduled to open in the summer of 2017, the new site is aimed at demonstrating the interaction of people, machines, storage equipment, automation, software and Industry 4.0 solutions.
Industry 4.0 offerings from Trumpf are all subsumed under the name TruConnect, and all the TruConnect key modules will be in operation at the Chicago plant. The production line is designed to support real production processes, with customers at Trumpf in Chicago able to dispatch their own orders.
The demo factory, with its initial staff of around 30 employees, is aimed at sheet metal fabricators; the main target group is small- and medium-sized job shops that are just starting out with digital connectivity. Their requirements, and findings from production, will be collected in the development offices on-site and then made available to the central R&D departments of the Trumpf Group. In addition, the experience of entirely new Industry 4.0 business models, such as capacity pooling, can be systematically gained within the fully connected factory.
Trumpf Chicago is seen as an international centre of excellence for Industry 4.0 solutions, and will boast architecture to match. The ‘Control Center’ - a command centre with large display areas – makes available to visitors in real time various process parameters. A bird’s-eye view of the factory reveals a catwalk, the so-called ‘Skywalk’. This spans the full length of the 55-meter-long hall, with its material and information flow, and emphasises that the production facilities constitute a single, overall system. The Skywalk is part of the cantilevered ceiling structure that is manufactured by a Trumpf customer in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
With construction costs estimated at about € 13 million, the demo factory was designed by the Berlin architectural office of Barkow Leibinger, the same company that built the Trump’s laser machine tool factory, Ditzingen, Germany.
