Accelerating the digital transformation
Siemens Xcelerator is an open digital business platform and marketplace with the ambition to create a powerful ecosystem of partners who can jointly accelerate digital transformation tailored to your specific business goals. Making digital transformation easier, faster and at scale.
Fast Company names Siemens a "World Changing Company of the Year"
Siemens has been honored with the recognition of "World Changing Company of the Year" by Fast Company, a media brand that focuses on the most innovative work happening around the world. In receiving this honor as part of the 2022 World Changing Ideas Awards, we were proud to join Microsoft, Abbott, and IBM among the only other companies that have ever been given this award. This underscores our commitment to the digital transformation, as we invest $1B+ annually in R&D in the U.S., while more than 140,000 companies use our software.
The last decade was about connecting consumers. This decade is the moment for industry and infrastructure. Data has become the foundation of modern companies, used to continuously improve every business process, from customer interactions to back-office operations. And in the age of Covid-19, the digital transformation of businesses is speeding up, as companies prioritize the ability to remotely monitor, control, and maintain equipment, while protecting data.
Smart infrastructure: Combining the real and the digital
Business, residential, and industrial centers can become much more efficient and human-centric through data analytics, AI, and networking. This increase in performance will help address the pressing demands of urbanization, climate change, and increasing populations.
Tracking technology: Staying operative while staying safe from COVID-19
With the necessity of social distancing, plant safety takes on a whole new meaning. Companies across the U.S. are trying to determine how best to protect their employees while ensuring optimal output with a smart, long-term technology investment. Siemens’ real-time locating system (RTLS) technology can be a key tool for optimal functioning for multiple industries. RTLS solutions can help plant and operation managers optimize facility layouts and protect employee health reliably and efficiently. By monitoring customer-defined unsafe interactions, RTLS can create a recorded history of employee interactions, helping to enforce social distancing and provide for contact tracing.
Artificial intelligence (AI): Traffic and city mobility solutions
Having an effective and efficient mobility ecosystem in cities while transportation demands continue to increase calls for a more holistic approach of how mobility is managed. That’s why Siemens Mobility is working on data- and AI-driven applications and services for even smarter management of road traffic and commercial fleets. Data- and AI-driven applications and services are essential to creating optimal mobility for U.S. cities. Connected vehicles sending data in real-time, infrastructure systems transmitting their status to our cloud-based system, while drivers and travelers who are connected with their smart phones all produce an immense amount of useful, actionable data.
Our technology empowers our customers to transform the industries that form the backbone of our economies—this is what Siemens stands for and what holds us together. We seek to become the leading technology company for the industries that we serve to help our customers adapt to changing needs, changing markets, and a changing world.
Novel operations: Machines learning tasks through simulation
Developing physics-informed neural networks is quickly becoming a vast new field with a lot to teach us, because researchers can use it to go beyond classical applications for simulation, mostly in design and engineering, and open up new paradigms for how to operate equipment. Running a simulation in parallel to the actual operation of an asset, such as an electric motor can enable the use of the simulation to infer internal values that could not be collected using sensors. This creates a much more accurate understanding of performance, potentially enabling completely new operations.
Online options: Born of necessity, a new approach sets a standard
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Siemens New Kensington large-drives team in Pennsylvania optimized a combination of existing technologies to create a reliable factory-acceptance test process that our customers could easily join and our technicians could utilize in a production environment. With this, our NKN team met short turnaround times, including the very first order for the newest SINAMICS PERFECT HARMONY GH150 Air-cooled drive—earning themselves the 2020 Siemens U.S. Excellence Award winner in the Performance category. Customer response was so positive that virtual testing has become the new default offering for NKN factory acceptance tests, although customers can still request or purchase an in-person test.
The future of energy: Flexible, adaptive, affordable
The Siemens Advanced Microgrid Research and Demonstration Lab is a place where researchers analyze how microgrids can accelerate energy access, enhance energy security, and reduce the impacts of energy uncertainty on human health and the natural environment. Research is also being conducted about how microgrids can help businesses and cities adapt to the effects of climate change.
Every Siemens customer should feel empowered by our technology to solve problems and collaborate closely with us and their other partners. We want our technology to make people feel empowered to ask questions, take risks, and do what they think will most help their company and customers, and realize their full potential. The flip side of empowerment is responsibility, and that is why everyone in the Siemens ecosystem seeks to uphold the highest standards while remaining nimble and innovative.
Software saves lives: A young engineer helps design a swimming-pool guard to protect children
Levi Zima, of RF Laboratories, is responsible for the quality control of the production of Poolguard, a cone-shaped device that floats in a swimming pool and warns parents if anything larger than a soccer ball goes in the water. He uses Siemens software to create communications between the floating cone and the alarm unit so that a warning signal is instantly relayed (the tech is smart enough not to react to small objects like rain, leaves, or toys). "We hear stories from customers who say my child is alive because your product worked," Levi says.
Designs for humans: Using software to make a difference in quality of life
Industry 4.0 is not all about computing power and data. An Alabama high-school senior named Ashley Kimbel proved that the digital revolution is really about how technology can expand what is humanly possible. Using Siemens Solid Edge software, Ashley was able to design, test, and build a prosthetic limb for a Marine Corps veteran who had lost his leg in Afghanistan as a result of enemy fire.
App for accessibility: Digitizing government processes to expedite financial housing relief for the community
Last year in San Antonio rising unemployment rates resulting from the pandemic drove a sudden increase in the number of citizens who needed immediate assistance from the City. Mendix, a Siemens company, was utilized by Kinetech to help San Antonio deploy a low-code app that made the process of applying for housing assistance more efficient and accessible to residents. The app did not require the skills of highly trained developers, and thus it launched in less than two weeks, meaning the City could immediately speed approval of applications to a matter of days—not months.
