The industrial metaverse is revolutionizing how companies design, plan and optimize complex manufacturing operations. At the forefront of this digital transformation is Siemens and their electronics factory in Erlangen, Germany — a company that the Digital Twin Insider has covered extensively recently here, here and here. In a recent interview, Siemens expert Velia Janetzky discussed the company’s cutting-edge work implementing “industrial metaverse enabling technologies” to drive innovation and efficiency.
Janetzky made clear that the metaverse isn’t just about bleeding-edge tech — it solves real business challenges.
“For everything that we do, there is a business reason behind it,” she stated. The metaverse allows Siemens to extensively model processes virtually before executing them physically. As Janetzky explained: “The more you know upfront, the more you can validate and optimise, the better your real life processes will be.”
Sustainability is also a key driver, with virtual simulations reducing material waste.
“We can cut down on the actual physical resources that we need in order to kind of prepare new production systems,” Janetzky noted. Digital twins additionally enable “optimizing our processes in operations so far that we know we’re always in a resource efficient way of operating.”
A particularly fascinating aspect is the incredibly realistic visualization capabilities. Janetzky described the experience of viewing a virtual factory environment: “You really aren’t unable anymore to really differentiate what you’re seeing in real time versus the virtual thing.” This “mind-bending” photorealism allows Siemens to seamlessly blend the digital and physical realms.
While the work so far is groundbreaking, Janetzky explained it’s an ongoing journey as Siemens builds “a scalable framework that can last” to achieve “the sustainable digital enterprise.” The future will involve tighter integration, with real-world changes automatically synced to the virtual models.
“The one key part of this is actually all the the stuff that we’re doing and all the changes that we make in the real world that are also transferred back into the virtual world,” she said.
With its pioneering industrial metaverse implementation, Siemens is charting an exciting path towards optimized, sustainable manufacturing through the convergence of the digital and physical worlds. The Erlangen factory is showcasing the art of the possible.
