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Preparing to reflect, and to forge ahead

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By Wim de Vos

Preparing to reflect, and to forge ahead

Previous Article       Next Article

By Wim de Vos

Preparing to reflect, and to forge ahead

Previous Article       Next Article

By Wim de Vos

SPE CEO Wim de Vos

Time flies by. The pace of innovation quickens. Product cycles shorten. Time to market accelerates. And every day our plastics industry helps to advance these evolutions.  

The digitalization of processes continues and even virtual technologies can help us to speed up or skip certain steps in the old product development processes. Time indeed goes so fast that it seems as if NPE 2015 was only yesterday and the K 2013 show only last month, but K 2016 is already upon us. 

No wonder the theme of this year’s K Show is Plastics Industry 4.0. Whilst information technology emerged at first to help support some of our industry’s functions, IT now is taking over some of our key functions, and playing a central role in both our manufacturing and business processes.  

This also has and will continue to impact the types of people we need to run the processes in our factories. We used to need chemists, polymer engineers and mechanical engineers to start up new machines, do new trials and run our operations. Human interpretation and manual adjustments always made a difference. This, for sure will not be the case tomorrow.  

Our industry will need IT people to run our processes — whether to simulate product or mold design, calculate properties, set up machine parameters or such. All this knowledge will be supplied by intelligent databases and software, which will adapt and update our systems and processes on a continuous, 24/7 basis. The search for talent will shift from finding the best chemist or engineer to employing the cleverest IT process person. 

This is a paradigm shift. Today, many of our plastics companies are led by CEOs who started their careers 20-30 years ago as chemical or mechanical engineers. In the future, more of our industry’s leaders are likely to come from an information technology background. The key aspects of Industry 4.0 are information, knowledge transfer and networking. Not surprisingly, SPE provides these same aspects — although SPE’s knowledge transfer and networking currently have a different perspective.  

This brings us to how SPE will support the plastics industry of tomorrow. And tomorrow = next year. In 2017 SPE will celebrate its 75th  anniversary — marking three-quarters of a century of excellence in supporting the plastics and polymer industry and its individuals. The Oct. 19-26 K Show in Düsseldorf is a starting point for us to begin our reflection of the past 75 years and to assess what lies ahead. 

This offers us an opportunity to reflect on those volunteers and leaders who made what SPE is today. We will acknowledge but not dwell on the past. We mostly want to reflect what our organisation should be in the next 75 years!

We want to have a dialog with you about our common future, how our industry will evolve, what resources it will require, what kinds of knowledge will be needed and how it will be transferred. Most of all, we want to learn how can SPE continue to be your go-to resource for finding whatever you need in the polymer and plastics industry. From the K Show onward, we will be featuring our SPE logo in a Futuristic 75, which will remind us that SPE needs to remain the vehicle for this industry for at least another 75 years. 

SPE — our past, our present, your future. 

 

Please help us to reflect and to prepare for the future. Share your thoughts about the association, its history, and our industry’s future, in the Industry Exchange section of SPE’s online forum The Chain: http://bit.ly/SPE_at_75