Open Conference: Equipped for change

As part of the exhibition, the Open Conference and special shows, visitors will learn how they can equip their company for the digital transformation and make processes even more efficient, transparent and cost-effective.

The informative supporting program consists of the accompanying Open Conference with various specialist forums, seminars, workshops and guided tours of the trade fair.

This will be supplemented by special shows. The exhibition will focus on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Business Intelligence (BI), IT security, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Production Planning and Control (PPC), Data Center & Infrastructure and Time Management.

Visitors can get a good overview during the daily Guided Tours by Trovarit on Business Software at Work or by VDMA on Industry 4.0.

This year, the forum program will be held under the name "Open Conference", thus emphasizing the high level of information transfer.

It covers the topics "Planning, Production & Human Resources", "Marketing, Sales & Services", "Organization and Administration" and "Market & Strategy".

These address managing directors, operational and IT managers, department heads from marketing and sales, production managers and HR managers as well as executives from organization and administration.

Visitors can choose from more than 200 expert presentations, discussion panels, live comparisons, best practice guides and theme days.

In order to illustrate the benefits of corporate IT to visitors, the organizer, Messe Stuttgart, together with partners, has integrated several special shows into IT & Business.

First and foremost, Elabo's Smart Factory. This will be expanded compared to the previous year through the participation of ELO Digital Office, ITML and MCL Computer & Accessories.

Together, they represent a complete process within a fictitious watch factory - from ordering to delivery and a downstream service scenario.

The visitor slips into different roles and acts partly as a customer and partly as an employee of the company. The ERP system is provided by ITML. It accommodates all the data required for the MES by means of a Hana database and thus supplies all the related processes.

At the same time, corresponding evaluations such as the temperature of the machine and the time still required for production are displayed in a dashboard created with SAP Design Studio.