The Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) — an alliance founded in 2019 to help manufacturing companies accelerate innovation ‘at scale’ through cross-industry collaboration, knowledge and data sharing, as well as access to new technologies — has expanded, with new steering-committee members and new working groups.

The OMP was founded under the umbrella of the Joint Development Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation.

The original members — BMW Group and Microsoft — have now welcomed Anheuser-Busch InBev, Bosch Group and ZF Friedrichshafen AG as steering-committee members.

The committee has approved a number of working groups to focus on core areas important to the industry, including IoT connectivity, semantic data models, Industrial IoT reference architecture, and core services for ATS (autonomous transport systems).

Jürgen Maidl, vice-president (production network and supply chain management) at BMW Group, said: “Our goal is to drive manufacturing innovation at scale, accelerate time-to-value and drive production efficiencies by jointly solving mutual challenges, based on an open community approach.

"The OMP helps manufacturing companies unlock the potential of their data, implement industrial solutions faster and more securely, and benefit from industrial contributions while preserving their intellectual property and competitive advantages, mitigating operational risks and reducing financial investments.”

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president (Cloud and AI ), said: “Through the open collaboration approach that is the cornerstone of OMP, manufacturing companies will be able to bring offerings to market faster, with increased scale and greater efficiency.

“Solutions will be published and shared across the community, regardless of technology, solution provider or cloud platform.”