Digitalization & New Technologies

Is the operator using gloves? Is the device located in a noisy environment? Digital applications have become part of daily life in factories. A good user experience (UX) keeps the wheels rolling. UX design should, therefore, not be left to guesswork.

Industry 4.0 raised great expectations for digitalization to enable more efficient production and revolutionize business models. Instead, the development froze down. Now social pressure acts as a catalyst for the renewal of business models. But why does this happen, and what does it take to succeed?

Electrification is a megatrend in the automotive, maritime, and mining industries. Within the megatrend, there is a growing transition from complex mechanical design to software-driven solutions, autonomous and highly automated operations, and cyber security standards. Also, the business model will face the change to servitization. This all requires a shift in competence. How is it possible to succeed in an electrification project when the change is so comprehensive?

Electric cars and bikes are already mainstream in many parts of the world. Electrification of heavy industry, on the other hand, advances more slowly. Nevertheless, a significant transformation is well on its way.

When nodes are added or removed from the cluster, we say that topology of the cluster changes. With virtual actor model, this introduces interesting challenges that are not present in typical stateless applications. Let’s take a look at how different frameworks handle this situation. When does the topology change? The main scenarios for topology change […]

Factories, mills, and plants are now seeking to improve factory efficiency, productivity, and sustainability to maintain a competitive edge in years to come. Not everyone will succeed, but it is easy to spot the telling signs of the companies standing among the winners in ten years, if you know where to look.

Smart factories, mills, and plants optimize efficiency and productivity in numerous ways, combining physical production processes with digital technology, smart computing, and big data. What kind of actions are we talking about in practice? To illustrate the path forward, we gathered five real-life inspirational smart factory examples of the steps industrial companies have taken toward intelligent factory automation creating a smarter, more efficient, and sustainable future.

Competence development is the key to successful change management and boosting business processes.

In previous articles we introduced the concept of virtual actors and their potential use in IoT, data stream processing, gaming and other fields. We also compared 4 most popular actor frameworks for the .NET ecosystem: Orleans, Proto.actor, Akka.Net and Dapr. Let’s see how they perform in an artificial messaging benchmark.