Siemens launches advance manufacturing competence centre in Singapore

SIEMENS has launched an advance manufacturing competence centre in Singapore to provide guidance, support and training to South-east Asian companies which have embarked on a journey towards advance manufacturing.

The centre will be a consulting, training, research and development (R&D), and small-scale production facility - all rolled into one.

The Advance Manufacturing Transformation Center (AMTC), as it has been called, combines three facilities: the Digital Enterprise Experience Center (DEX), the Additive Manufacturing Experience Center (AMEC) and Rental Labs.

DEX showcases digital-enterprise solutions, which enable companies to create digital twins of their envisioned advance manufacturing plants so they are able to simulate, optimise and evaluate manufacturing operations before constructing the actual plant.

The AMEC supports R&D, prototyping and low-volume 3D printing production, while Rental Labs provides affordable access to the latest industrial design software, high-end additive manufacturing printers and post-processing equipment, Siemens said.

Raimund Klein, the company's Asean executive vice-president of digital industries, in a statement on Thursday that most companies today understand the urgent need for digital transformation, and the disruption brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has emphasised that.

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"But many companies are deterred by factors such as complex and unintegrated technologies, the high cost of transition, disruption to business continuity and lack of technical experts," he added.

Siemens, through the AMTC, is teaming up with SkillsFuture Singapore to roll out a six-month additive-manufacturing training course under the SGUnited Mid-Career Pathways Programme.

This programme is aimed at mid-career job seekers with skills in additive manufacturing and digitalisation, to prepare them for roles such as programmable logic controller engineers and automation engineers. This is to better support the current wave of industrial companies undergoing digital transformation, Siemens said.

The AMTC will host projects for trainees to work on and organise project demonstration days so they can pitch their projects to potential hiring employers. Its ecosystem consists of technology providers, education and research institutes, and government agencies.

The technology providers are EOS, GeorgFischer, HP Inc, SESTO Robotics and Ultimaker. The education and research institutes are the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star), Singapore Polytechnic, TUM Asia and TUV SUD. (see amendment note)

Besides SkillsFuture, the other government agencies in the AMTC ecosystem are the Singapore Economic Development Board, JTC Corporation and National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Cluster.

Amendment note: An earlier version of the article incorrectly stated that HP Enterprise was one of the technology providers. Siemens has since corrected the entity name to be HP Inc. The article above has been revised to reflect this.