Furniture manufacturers have to respond to increasingly fragmented markets and customer demands for ever-shorter turnaround times and highly customized products and services. To survive, they need to offer a greater variety of products, reduce the size of their production runs and increase their throughput speeds. Self-learning systems, intelligent sensors and actuators, smart factories, the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems: these are just some of the catchwords that describe our industrial future. But how, specifically, can manufacturers reduce processing and delivery timeframes? How can production processes be organized in such a way that custom-tailored products cost no more to make than their mass-produced counterparts? Every mistake during processing is costly and delays delivery of the final product. But what if there were “smart” tools for furniture manufacturing operations that could self-correct wear-related deviations from the specified dimensions? Do such tools already exist, or are they just wishful thinking? Finding the answers to these questions is all but impossible in the absence of market transparency. And that’s where trade fairs come into play.
Automation systems have been an integral part of LIGNA’s holistic technology offering for many years. The fair features both exhibitors who incorporate such systems into their processing machines and exhibitors who develop and supply the actual automation components.
Christian Pfeiffer, LIGNA Director at Deutsche Messe: “Taking an integrated manufacturing approach will increasingly become critical to the long-term survival of any furniture company that’s exposed to global competition. The world’s top machinery and automation systems suppliers have already developed many groundbreaking innovations in this space that give us a very clear indication of which way things are heading. As the world’s leading fair for the forestry, timber and furniture industries, LIGNA is ideally positioned to help industry professionals navigate the very complex technologies involved and to convey the resulting challenges and opportunities in an easy-to-understand fashion to a wide audience. We will continue to listen closely to and take guidance from manufacturers as we chart the future development of the show and decide how best to present both the myriad possibilities and the limitations of the latest innovations in an accessible fashion.”
As of 2015, the world’s No. 1 platform for future-defining process solutions for the timber and furniture industries will be featured in the new “Smart Manufacturing” display. The Integrated Manufacturing display will put the spotlight on smart and fully integrated production systems for the value networks of the wood processing and woodworking industries. There, visiting furniture industry professionals, in particular, can expect to see a whole range of new and highly innovative manufacturing concepts and solutions.
One section of the new display area will deal with the question of how materials and products within the value chain can be securely tagged with relevant information. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology offers one possible solution. From 11 to 15 May 2015, LIGNA partner abaco Informationssysteme GmbH will stage the RFID-Factory display in Hall 17. Visitors to the 500-square-meter (5,380 sq. ft.) interactive exhibit will be able take a captivating tour of a fully integrated supply chain, from start to finish. The exhibit comprises nine segments featuring various partners – from freshly felled tree to timber processing, woodworking and furniture component production, furniture manufacturing, logistics services and retailing, right through to the fully assembled piece of furniture in the customer’s home.