On the sidelines of the Lider conference Fourth Industrial Revolution held at the Westin hotel last week, we briefly spoke with Marin Bek, co-founder of Ascalia, about the solutions his company can offer to manufacturing companies in Croatia.
How do you assess the state of digitalization in manufacturing in Croatia?
At Ascalia, we have spoken with about a hundred manufacturing companies over the past two years, of which we visited around 50 factories. The situation is not great; often you have companies with revenues of five hundred million to a billion kuna annually, and they are very far from digitalization. Some machines are old, some inherited from the 80s and 90s of the last century, and they are not even connected, let alone digitized, so the level of digitalization compared to Germany, where we also operate, is relatively low.
How could this be improved in a relatively short time?
The biggest problem in digitalization is that machines are expensive. The average machine in manufacturing costs 150,000, 300,000, or even more euros, and therefore justifying the purchase of a new machine for the sake of digitalization is very difficult for a company, especially if it has 50 or a hundred machines. Thus, the easiest and fastest way to approach this problem is through digitalization using solutions that enable retrofitting, i.e., solutions that utilize new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) to digitize old machines without the need to purchase new ones and with a long period of machine downtime. Such solutions are precisely what Ascalia offers, where we specialize in factories with old equipment that want to digitalize but are not ready or do not have the capacity to invest millions of euros solely in digitalization.
