We're back for Digital Talks 2021
Join your industry peers for our flagship Digital Talks event taking place at Manchester Central on 2 and 3 June 2021. Register your interest and let us know what you would like to see and do at the event
If you missed the event, a session, or just want to catch up - check out the content below!

Digital Talks Podcast Series
This series is in conversation with the best of the industry to equip you with the knowledge to support you on your own digital journey.
Guests include Jeremy Silver, CEO - Digital Catapult; Mike Lewis, Innovations Director - Mpac Lambert; Dame Judith Hackitt, Chair of Make UK; Sarah Black-Smith, Head of Factory Operations - Siemens Congleton, and many more!

Taking to the stage for Digital Talks 2019
Peers in one immersive setting transforming industry together!
We’re in the thick of creating an awesome Digital Talks 2019. Last year’s event involved 230 attendees from 180 organisations. Having attended the event, 100% felt more confident about what digitalisation could do for their organisation. To know we’re helping you fathom out this journey of continuous improvement is why we’re back doing it again. However this year, we’re hoping for bigger and better! You can expect: • Industry-specific programmes - you will receive a recommended schedule to get the most relevant content on the day! • Peer to peer stories about what it means to transform and the challenges and triumphs along the way • Vast exhibition with technical talks and demos • Collaboration zone with technology, innovation and finance partners to help you pave practical pathways to digitalisation. See you there!
Topic highlights
Turning data into value with the Internet of Things
MindSphere lets you harness data from machines and physical infrastructure to find transformative insights across an entire business. It lets you develop, deploy and run digital services, create your own applications or even new business models.
Getting the physical and virtual worlds talking with the Digital Twin
The digital twin is the precise virtual model of a product or a production plant. It displays their development throughout the entire lifecycle and allows operators to predict behavior, optimising performance, and incorporating insights from previous design and production experiences. At Siemens the digital twin consists of three forms: the digital twin of the product, the digital twin of production, and the digital twin of the performance.
Simulation of physical properties in the virtual world
Simulation and test software covers the capabilities you require to build and maintain a digital twin. It combines multidisciplinary design exploration, engineering simulation and test with intelligent reporting and data analytics to help you predict real product behaviour throughout the entire product lifecycle
Cybersecurity
Billions of devices are connected by the Internet of things, which can present risk. Siemens takes cybersecurity and protection of assets and infrastructure very seriously - underpinned by the Charter of Trust.
Return on investment
Traditionally, manufacturers have paid their suppliers for products or services. But in an outcome-based world, suppliers get paid based on results, minimising the financial risk for manufacturers. An outcome-based relationship helps you build a sustainable business and the reccomendations will fit with your unique challenge and ultimately have a financial benefit.
Skills for the future
Digital factories naturally demand new skills, but that doesn't always mean new people. Encouraging people to lead the change – and supporting them along the way – is critical. Dame Judith Hackitt, Chair of EEF, the Manufacturers Association, talks on a recent Digital Talks podcast about how upskilling can help manufacturers transform.

Digital Talks Podcast Series
Our podcast series lets you hear from the best of the industry’s people, hosted by BBC Radio 2’s Tim Smith, and is full of boardroom conversation starters, as well as practical insight to help you get started on your transformation journey.
Event Programme
This year's flagship event includes a keynote theatre programme, a seminar programme and an exhibition. Whether you want to hear from your industry peers sharing their experiences, see and touch the latest technology, or understand what your continuous improvement steps could look like and how to make it happen, we have it all under one roof in an exciting and immersive setting. If you are in the Food and Beverage, Chemical, Pharmaceutical, Intralogistics or Machine Building sector there are dedicated sessions that will be worth joining. But don't worry if you are from any other sector because you've been well thought of and there will be other sessions that absolutely apply to you!09:30-10:30 Plenary session
Graham Malley - Principal Director Digital Manufacturing at Accenture
Rainer Brehm - Head of Automation for Products and Systems at Siemens
10:30-15:30 Seminar Programme and Exhibition
Session 1 - Accelerating product development and product innovation, using automation and digitalisation
Jonathan Hague, Vice President R&D Homecare Discover - Unilever
Session 2 - Facing into the challenge of making our factories more efficient.
John Griffiths, Engineering Director - Princes Foods Ltd
Industry 4.0 is here and quite rightly so, however the reality is that for the vast majority of companies in the Food and Drink sector, it is going to be very difficult to realise the potential.
Food and Drink is bigger than Automotive and Aerospace combined, but still hasn’t got the basics right.
The presentation aims to address some of the challenges Industry faces with a multidimensional set of solutions:
- The market place is suffering year on year deflation and retailers in the main have short term horizons – This overall inhibits investment
- Our factories are full of legacy equipment, a great deal of which is sub optimised and in some instances not even connectable.
- Integration between IT and Ops is poor. Digital is ‘ A system of systems’ but the systems don’t connect well.
- Control system standards are extremely difficult to bolt down, due to business investment cycles not keeping pace with technological cycles.
- Workforce skills are behind where they need to be, combine all the legacy and non standardisation with a workforce that needs upskilling, makes for a very big challenge.
The factory of the future needs standardisation, connectivity, information and data to hand and a highly skilled workforce to complement, optimise and continuosly improve and challenge what is there.
How can we move forward together ?
Session 1 - Future supply chains: a chemical company’s vision and journey to a no touch, digital world
Marco Del Seta, Head of Digital – BOC-Linde
When I first came to BOC, the very first activity I was engaged in was a two day event to plan the future strategy of our company. Core to our supply chain vision was the concept of no touch: we wanted to reach a state where as much as possible our customers’ orders would be processed with value adding touches only, otherwise we wanted to drive full automation through digital and mechanical technologies. Is this a sustainable vision for a traditional process manufacturing business? What are the key components of it, what has been achieved? What are the skills required to pull this off and how to we bring them in? We’ll take a quick tour of my experiences in this space.
Session 2 - Panel Debate
Sharron Todd, CEO, Society of Chemical Industry (SCI); Darren Budd, Commercial Director, BASF; Dr Richard Smith, Director, 2M Holdings Ltd
Digitalisation and IOT have been identified by the UK Chemistry Council as one of the main strategy levers to accelerate innovation-led growth in the chemical industries. With comment from leading UK Chemical companies, this panel debate will explore the challenges and opportunities that digitalisation brings to the sector. Topics such as predictive quality, the digital plant, the connected supply chain and product customisation, will be discussed.
Session 1: A small company with a big vision behind a revolutionary packaging system: The story one year on. Digitalisation at the heart of design, production and performance.
Martin Leeming, CEO - TrakRap
TrakRap has been developing a new machine specifically designed to wrap aerosol canisters in a way that reduces energy consumption and packing material. Through a collaborative project with several partners, Siemens technology has been used to virtually develop, test and commission TrakRap’s latest machine using a digital twin. This has enabled TrakRap to build a machine - not a prototype - first time around.
In the manufacturing environment, TrakRap’s machine can adapt to different types of environment, product and set up, enabling them to predict quality, throughput and timescales.
After a physical machine is installed on a customer site, it will be permanently paired with its digital twin. Existing applications will feed real-time operational data to the cloud for comparison with data generated simultaneously by the digital twin. With 24/7 management of each machine, potential issues will easily be anticipated and downtime avoided.
TrakRap has also been able to maintain ownership of the machines it produces and provide customers with a service based on output and measured in terms of ‘pay-per-wrap’. TrakRap’s solution therefore requires no capital investment from customers and offers added value because of the significant reduction in the amount of energy and packing material consumed.
Martin Leeming, CEO, explains how digitalisation continues to help TrakRap make massive strides in an industry that’s very competitive.
Session 2: A unique view point of manufacturing from SME to multi-national. From batch size of one to 100's million units per year all within the evolving digital space.
Mike Lewis, Innovations Director - Lambert Engineering
Find out:
- What Lambert Engineering are doing to move the business forward adopting digital technologies - as a SME manufacture in the UK
- How they are trying to demystify Industry 4.0 and what is means to our products and services
- The industry more widely and what is means for a start up and an established multi-national
Session 1: The Digital Transformation Of Medicines Manufacturing
Phillip Dale, Engineering Director - FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies; Andy Dwyer, Innovation Lead – GSK / MMIP; Alfredo Ramos, Healthcare Director – CPI; Andrew Whytock – Head of Digitalisation and Innovation - Siemens
The race is on to bring new and affordable medicines to market, quicker than ever before. New diseases require innovative cures, and increased competition requires faster, leaner processes in all aspects of operations, without any compromise on quality.
The pace of innovation and the ability to disrupt are becoming key success factors, challenging the way drugs have been produced until now.
This session will bring together influential leaders from Big Pharma, CDMO’s, OEM’s, Trade Associations and Academia to explore how the Digital Transformation of Medicines Manufacturing is opening up new business opportunities across the entire pharma value chain.
Session 2: Smart Biomanufacturing: Next-Generation Biopharma Processes
Dr Colin Clarke, Principal Investigator - Nibrt; Mike Hughes, Head of Operations and Technology – Ipsen BioPharm; Daniel McCarthy, Principal R&D Engineer – Pall Life Sciences; Keith Morris, Subject Matter Expert - PM Group
The quest for smart biopharma processes is driven by the emergence of three trends:
1) Personalised medicines, often tailored by the genome of the patient, as a new treatment option for both rare and widespread diseases
2) Flexibility as a means to make plants smarter and adaptable
3) Using digitalisation to acquire a deep level of process understanding
Join industry experts from Pharma Manufacturers, CDMO’s, OEM’s, Trade Associations and Academia, who will discuss how they are collaborating to accelerate the implementation of smart biomanufacturing solutions.
Session 1 - Andrew Selim, Projects Manager – Ocado Engineering
Session 2 - Digitizing the manufacturing process, Amazons batch of one.
Bart Schouwenaars-Harms, Manager Industrial Solutions - Amazon
This talk will show how manufacturing processes can be optimised using cloud connectivity and technologies. Examples will be shown from Amazon Fulfilment and others.
From everyday life to virtual commissioning – how digital twins makes everything more efficient
In our digital world simulation is accessible everywhere : from weather system predictions to video games we rely more and more on information generated by software meant to make our lives more efficient. Building machines, operating lines or programming robots can benefit from these technologies for a faster go to market, a better flexibility and an higher final quality. During this conference we will look at how without noticing digital twins are helping us in our everyday life. We’ll look then in details how the Siemens offering can solve the different challenges faced by machine and line builders along all steps of the lifecycle.
From automated to autonomous production
Across all industries, end customers increasingly demand individualised high-quality products at the cost of mass-produced goods. Moreover, rising resource costs, global competition, and growing production complexity require new solutions to optimize productivity and efficiency. The key is using data from machines and plants in innovative ways to gain new insights and take the digital twins of machines, plants, processes, and products to a new level.
Bringing automation, digitalisation, and future technologies together in an integrated, seamless way enables the comprehensive transformation of data into valuable knowledge – the next step of digital transformation. The efficient usage of data makes future technologies so powerful. Combined with today’s or even tomorrow’s computing power it becomes possible to integrate advanced analytics into automation.
Industry support available to help get digitalisation off the ground
A problem shared is a problem halved, a saying that makes absolute sense, especially if the organisation you’re sharing the problem with has:
- Skills & experience you don’t currently have
- Access to funding
- Time & space to try new things
- Ability to collaborate with other organisations
Industry 4.0 means different things to different people, organisations large and small are trying to understand what it means for them, whether it be in the application of robotics, making better decisions based on data, or the utilisation of virtual tools, they can all be a massive risk if you’ve never invested in such technologies before.
In this session we’ll be sharing examples of best practice and successful use cases, including how Siemens manufacturing has benefited from collaboration and how we’ve supported many of our customers by signposting to organisations present in the exhibition ‘Collaboration Zone’.
The ‘Collaboration Zone’ through the exhibition will provide access to organisations who can de-risk investment in digitalisation, provide the innovative skills and funding necessary to ensure you make the right decisions as you take those first steps on your journey towards Industry 4.0.
SIMATIC PCS neo – Enter a new world of process control
The process industry currently operates in a very complex environment, and the requirements for its control technology are correspondingly demanding. SIMATIC PCS neo is the intelligent response to this challenge: a fully web-based process control system with object-oriented data management.
This session will introduce you to a new world of process control…SIMATIC PCS neo. It will cover how the challenges of usability, scalability, system access and collaboration can be met and exceeded with our innovative ground-breaking process control system.
Digital design, digital operations - incorporating deep process knowledge within plant automation systems
A digital twin is composed of many software elements that are already state of the art. New perspectives are opened by the integration of individual models and simulation tools to a holistic, semantically integrated system, integrated across different hierarchy levels of the plant, and integrated along all phases of plant lifecycle. This presentation shows the vision of incorporating digital twins across the plant lifecycle.
From analytics to deployed applications
Other the past years, Siemens has worked with customers to leverage digitalization and unlock the power of industrial data. The deeper use of data pools and linking of hardware, software and cloud platforms creates a new level of data consistency and knowledge acquisition from data – delivering more flexible and productive processes.
Based on the finding delivered through data analytics combined with process know-how, results can be derived into operational applications that will support daily business. The combination of such applications on a common architecture can deliver dedicated, while remaining flexible, industry specific suites that deliver unprecedented transparency and context to the information available. For example, the detection of an earlier wear on a valve leads to the detection of an unstable control loop, which in turn impacts product quality.
The Digital Enterprise portfolio offers end-to-end solutions for the specific requirements of the process industries. Starting from consulting, through analytics to the development of software applications, Siemens is well suited to support the process industry in their digital transformation.
This supports increases flexibility, productivity and new business models for companies of any sector or size.
- Digitalization consulting – finding the business benefits
- Data Analytics – what can I learn from my data
- Software development / MVP – Making it operational
- Suite of Applications for the process industries – getting benefits quickly
- References and examples
Industry support available to help get digitalisation off the ground
A problem shared is a problem halved, a saying that makes absolute sense, especially if the organisation you’re sharing the problem with has:
- Skills & experience you don’t currently have
- Access to funding
- Time & space to try new things
- Ability to collaborate with other organisations
Industry 4.0 means different things to different people, organisations large and small are trying to understand what it means for them, whether it be in the application of robotics, making better decisions based on data, or the utilisation of virtual tools, they can all be a massive risk if you’ve never invested in such technologies before.
In this session we’ll be sharing examples of best practice and successful use cases, including how Siemens manufacturing has benefited from collaboration and how we’ve supported many of our customers by signposting to organisations present in the exhibition ‘Collaboration Zone’.
The ‘Collaboration Zone’ through the exhibition will provide access to organisations who can de-risk investment in digitalisation, provide the innovative skills and funding necessary to ensure you make the right decisions as you take those first steps on your journey towards Industry 4.0.
15:30-16:45 Closing keynote - Networks and Cyber-security
Ciaran Murphy - O.T. Cyber Security Engineering Lead for NeoDyne
Short tech talks around the exhibition
How to design for Industry 4.0
Designing right the first time
Is your plant ready for Industry 4.0
Reducing commissioning delays
Why physical testing?
How to turn product data into knowledge
Augmented Reality Advantages
Cloud based engineering
Automatic engineering tasks
SIMATIC MindSphere applications
Industrial Edge
Artificial Intelligence built in
The power of Totally Integrated Automation
Totally Integrated Automation – keeping you secure
Digitalisation and drive technology
The power of the digital twin
Kinematics made easy
Web-based process control system – SIMATIC PCS Neo
Foundation of digitalisation in the process industry
Digital Twin using SIMIT
NOA / Valve App monitoring
Advanced diagnostics with PCS 7 using Siemens instrumentation
Digital Application Suite for the process industry
Getting started with consultation and cocreation
The operational landscape
The collaboration zone
The ‘Collaboration Zone’ through the exhibition will provide access to organisations who can de-risk investment in digitalisation, provide the innovative skills and funding necessary to ensure you make the right decisions as you take those first steps on your journey towards Industry 4.0. Organisations include:
- High Value Manufacturing Catapult
- Siemens Financial Services
- Digital Catapult
- Innovate UK
- Made Smarter
- SEMTA
- MTA
- IET