Smart & Dark Factories are production environments that operate largely autonomously and are fully digitally controlled.
Symbol supports manufacturing organisations in exploring opportunities and finding the right partners.
A Smart Factory is a highly automated production environment where machines, sensors, and systems are connected via IIoT. Real-time data, AI, Digital Twins, cobots, and machine vision support process optimisation, quality monitoring, and predictive maintenance. People remain involved in decision-making, improvement, and complex tasks.
A Dark Factory goes further and functions almost entirely autonomously. Robots, AGVs, and intelligent systems perform production, internal transport, inspection, and process adjustment without continuous human intervention. Employees primarily focus on design, data analysis, technical management, and optimisation.
Both concepts combine automation and digitalisation to produce flexibly, efficiently, and predictably with high quality and minimal waste and downtime.
Smart and Dark Factories are highly automated and autonomous production environments. Many components and disciplines play a role in this. Symbol – with its partners – focuses on, among others, the following components.
MES controls and records production orders, material flows, quality, and performance. SCADA monitors and operates machines and process installations in real-time. Together, they connect planning, execution, and process control for transparent, managed production and traceability.
IIoT connects machines, sensors, products, and systems via industrial networks. This enables real-time collection and sharing of process data for monitoring, analysis, predictive maintenance, quality improvement, and faster operational decision-making within connected production environments.
Cyber-Physical Systems combine physical machines with software, sensors, and digital control. They recognise products, analyse real-time conditions, and make autonomous decisions, allowing production processes to function flexibly, adaptively, and largely autonomously.
Digital Twins are digital representations of products, machines, or processes. Real-time data and simulations provide insight into performance, predict behaviour, and test improvements before changes are implemented in the physical environment.
AGVs follow fixed routes, while AMRs navigate autonomously and avoid obstacles. Both automatically transport materials, improving internal logistics and reducing waiting times, manual transport, safety risks, and process interruptions within production and warehouses.
A digital transformation journey with Symbol begins with an assessment of processes, data, systems, skills, and ambitions. This allows us to determine digital maturity and select promising projects based on value, feasibility, and risk.
Subsequently, Symbol supports partner selection, pilot development, implementation, training, and assurance. Technologies such as AI, Digital Twins, IIoT, MES, predictive maintenance, and vision are linked to concrete operational issues.
Within CIMM Level 5, digitalisation makes processes adaptive, autonomous, and predictive. Organisations can therefore react faster to deviations, continuously improve, and remain future-proof by systematically combining reliable data, integrated technology, and human craftsmanship within daily operational decision-making and execution.
Symbol helps organisations recognise Smart Factory opportunities and set up data-driven, connected, and future-proof production processes.