Sirris is now part of the umati community and the first Belgian partner.

What expectations do you have of umati, what do you expect from the partnership?

“For the Belgian technological industry, connectivity of their production systems is important to enable digitization and reap the benefits of Industry 4.0. To solve the interoperability challenge caused by different generations of production machines (legacy and new), formats and protocols, open domain standards for different types of processes, machines and equipment are crucial. We want to help Belgian manufacturing companies as well as their technology suppliers to early apply these new standards. We also want to contribute to shaping Umati so that it responds to their needs.”
Véronique Dossogne, Engineer Smart Production & Factory of the Future 

What advantages does umati offer your company and your customers?

“On the one hand we want to know which technology suppliers want to support and offer umati in the future. On the other hand, we want to cooperate with other European partners on recent developments and proofs of concept. More concretely, starting from the needs of Belgian companies we aim to:

• build a demonstrator illustrating the potential to industry;
• discover the benefits, possible limitations and the level of detail of the data models;
• check the deployment of the umati models for machines and equipment on their feasibility in SMEs;
• offer knowledge and support for the implementation of umati;
• provide feedback towards the OPC UA models that umati covers.

Being member of the umati ecosystem gives us the opportunity to be inspired by and apply other umati members’ best-practices and approach. Sirris is therefore proud to be the first umati research partner in Belgium.”
Jakob Kesteloot, Engineer IoT 

How do you evaluate the expansion of the Umati initiative to the entire mechanical engineering industry?

“Sirris offers support to the entire technology industry in Belgium. The fact that umati is not limiting itself to one particular machine industry is therefore very interesting to us. Communication between different machines, robots, AGVs, … requires a wide coverage, such as umati offers. We see umati as a leading initiative in the rollout of Industry 4.0. Sirris would like to help umati to geographically expand to the Belgian production industry and we want to raise awareness with the Belgian companies of the opportunities umati has to offer them.”
Jan Kempeneers, Principal Engineer Smart and Digital Factory

About Sirris

Sirris is the collective centre for and by the Belgian technology industry. At Sirris, we help companies innovate and make their product, factory and business futureproof. Each year more than 150 experts help about 1,300 companies to make the right technological choices and to realise their innovation projects successfully. Our people, combined with our exclusive, high-tech infrastructure on different sites over the country and our extensive network of (inter)national partners, give us a unique position in industrial technological innovation in Belgium. More at www.sirris.be.