Discrete Manufacturing is often characterized by limited volume and very high in complexity. New markets, new materials and new technologies require sustained increase in plant-efficiency and productivity as well as extreme flexibility in all manufacturing processes.

Critical for these industries is the ability to improve production quality and time-to-market speed while cutting costs.

Discrete Industries have been the drivers of many of the concepts of SIMATIC IT including a fully integrated solution with particular relevance to sectors such as automotive and trucks, aerospace, and mechanical and electronic assembly.

SIMATIC IT for Discrete Industry ensures greater process-flexibility and efficiency, complete integration of regulatory and quality requirements, synchronized production processes for optimal supply-chain management, and sustained reductions in maintenance and operation costs.

The solution is based on a standard platform and offers "Plant-to-Business" interoperability based on real-time information flows between the business level and the control level. This guarantees flexibility within the manufacturing processes, waste minimization and performance improvements by systematically discovering hidden capacities and enabling their efficient use.