Munich, 14 May 2025 – Sina Scheidle, Head of BodyTEC at Mercedes-Benz AG, and former BDI President Prof. Siegfried Russwurm discussed the digitalization of German and European industry with professors at the spring conference in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. “We are in global competition, we must take note of this and work on our competitiveness in production before we fall even further behind,” emphasized Russwurm, acting Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp and the Voith Group. WGP President Prof. Michael Zäh added: “Despite the many achievements already made, there is still great potential for improvement.”
Sina Scheidle, was able to report on her experiences at the BodyTEC Center at Mercedes-Benz. The center bears end-to-end responsibility for the production of body parts and press tools. This includes all process steps from the development of forming tools to production in the press shop.
Scheidle also presented the Mercedes-Benz digital production ecosystem, MO360 for short. She reported on how, with the help of digital twins and virtual commissioning, all data from individual production systems was digitally recorded and planned, tested and adapted accordingly in virtual space. “Thanks to generative AI, it was possible to reduce energy consumption by 20% in the top coat booths at the Rastatt plant, for example,” said Scheidle. Interested employees can train to become digitalization experts at the Digital Factory Campus Berlin, for example.
Specialists and managers are the bottleneck
The training of today’s and tomorrow’s specialists and managers also played a major role in the panel discussion. Siegfried Russwurm emphasized that companies need to work “significantly” on the topic of internships for students, for example, in order to show the attractive professional reality in engineering professions and at the same time enable a sense of achievement in concrete projects.
In order to meet the demand for so-called data workers, Mercedes-Benz has launched the internal in-service training program D.SHIFT. “It qualifies employees for digitalization and AI tasks and shapes them into ‘digital superheroes’, as they are known internally,” said Scheidle. In view of global competition, Russwurm warned that driving digitalization forward and finding enough well-trained people for this is one of the biggest challenges facing German and European industry.
Russwurm countered the question of whether AI has been sufficiently incorporated into university curricula by saying that there is no such thing as “enough”. It is much more important to show young people that AI is not just in ChatGPT and cell phones. They need to be introduced to AI applications in production, but then also “let the digital natives do it” – in project work in industry and at university institutes.
In order to advance Industry 4.0 quickly, cooperation between research and practice must also be intensified. Universities should not only focus their funding on state support, but also specifically seek private sector investors. According to the former BDI President, industry must play its part and also contribute money.
Further research on Manufacturing-X
Industry 4.0 and digitalization is one of the most important research topics at the 44 WGP institutes. The WGP professors therefore want to examine the extent to which the further development of Industry 4.0 should be taken up as part of the Manufacturing-X initiative – i.e. the development of cooperating, decentralized data ecosystems along complete process and supply chains. “With regard to the further development of production research, we not only have to understand the approaches in Manufacturing-X, but we also have to help shape them as the WGP,” emphasizes Prof. Thomas Bergs, spokesperson for the working group. This also includes making the potential arising from these initiatives available to medium-sized manufacturing companies and, for example, developing traceability as a business model. Which issues are relevant for German and European industry and which standards are already working today will be examined using specific use cases, such as the end-to-end quality control of safety-critical engine turbine disks as part of the Aerospace – X project. “At the autumn conference in November, we will then take a closer look at other project initiatives, such as Factory -X, and identify relevant fields of action for the WGP,” says Bergs.
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Image 1: Panel discussion at the WGP Spring Conference (from left to right: Prof. Michael Zäh, WGP President; Prof. Siegfried Russwurm, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp and the Voith Group; Sina Scheidle, Head of BodyTEC, Mercedes-Benz AG); source: WGP
Image 2: Prof. Thomas Bergs, Head of the Manufacturing Technology Institute (MTI) at RWTH Aachen University; Source: WZL Aachen
Image 3: Sina Scheidle, Head of BodyTEC at Mercedes-Benz AG; source: private
Image 4: Prof. Siegfried Russwurm, current Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp and the Voith Group and BDI President until 2024; source: private
Image 5: Prof. Michael Zäh, President of the WGP and Head of the Institute for Machine Tools and Industrial Management (iwb) at the Technical University of Munich; source: iwb TU Munich