Oct 13, 2022

Ascon Systems Strengthens Management Team

Author

Kelly Lübbers

Head of Marketing

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Stuttgart, Germany – 13.09.2022

Ascon Systems Holding GmbH (“Ascon Systems”), provider of disruptive no-code control technology that bridges the gap between physical and cyber-physical systems and enables industrial metaverse solutions, is pleased to announce the appointment of Jens Müller as CEO.  Müller strengthens the Ascon Systems management with strong expertise in digital business models, especially Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”). Together with the founders and the management team, he will further scale the company and strengthen the market position of Ascon’s Digital Twin technology. Müller was able to establish and scale groundbreaking new technologies in a very short time as CEO of Berlin-based real estate decarbonization platform provider BuildingMinds and at relayr, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology and solutions powerhouse.

“We were able to convince Jens of the extraordinary potential of our technology and thus complete the management team,” says Dr. Raimund Menges, representing the founders and shareholders of Ascon Systems. “Jens understands the company as well as our culture and sees the great opportunities for Ascon Systems thanks to our breakthrough technology. Both his SaaS experience and technical expertise from various industries as well as his track record in building companies will support us in achieving our ambitious goals. I personally, as well as the entire Ascon team, are very much looking forward to a successful future together.” Dr. Menges will continue to be a member of the Management Board and the Advisory Board.

In addition to Müller, the management team has been strengthened this year with the appointment of Uwe Reumuth as CFO in March. Reumuth was previously CFO of the BELLIN Group, as well as CFO of Open-XChange.

“Ascon Systems’ strong corporate culture and its unique technology have excited me from day one,” commented Jens Mueller. “The continuous investment in team and software development enables Ascon Systems to effectively and efficiently support our customers in their digital transformation and to be a long-term, reliable partner.”

About Ascon Systems Holding GmbH

Ascon Systems Holding GmbH (Ascon Systems), The Digital Twin Company, was founded in 2017 in Stuttgart Germany.  Ascon Systems is the leading technology provider of software that enables automation without coding, making wide-scale process automation accessible for everyone across industries. Ascon Systems has over 130 employees with headquarters in Stuttgart and offices in Berlin, Heilbronn, Mainz and München, as well as remote employees. Ascon Systems’ recent recognitions include the Innovation Award Baden-Württemberg 2020, EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2020 and the CyberOne Hightech Award 2019.

Contact:

Kelly Luebbers
Kelly.luebbers@ascon-systems.de
+49 1515 2288742

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Jan 8, 2021

Foundation of the industrial.Digitalisation PartnerNet e.V. organization

Author

Kelly Lübbers

Head of Marketing

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Press release
Wolfsburg, 4 December 2020

Supporting industrial artificial intelligence & IoT: Seven partner companies found a manufacturer-independent “non-profit” industrial.Digitalisation PartnerNet e.V. as an innovation driver for the automotive and manufacturing sectors. One of the participating companies is Volkswagen.

Seven partner companies recently founded an open, manufacturer-independent and “non-profit” industrial.Digitalisation PartnerNet e.V. organization with a focus on promoting application-focused research and development as well as in-company qualification and training around Industrie 4.0.

Smart Co-Innovation@cross-industries.cluster is to be created, in which research and development on innovative technologies is driven forward and these technologies and project results are rolled out across the entire vehicle industry through well-organized transfer.

Examples are AI-optimized and modular production, cross-industry and collaborative use of production data based on Industrial IoT Cloud platform or energy-efficient e-vehicles. Also in focus is the co-creation of Digital Use Cases and Smart Services 4.0 around Digital Production Ecosystem of the future based on new Digital Technologies, such as: Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Industrial Cloud IoT Platform, 5G Mobile Network and Smart Car HMI and Software.

The goal is the fast, flexible and cost-effective transfer of project results into practical industrial applications, if possible as highly scalable industrial standards.

PartnerNet co-founders are: Arxum, Ascon Systems, BearingPoint, ifp Software, Fujitsu, Synergeticon and Volkswagen.

In this context, a smart start-up incubation program encourages young talents and junior scientists to act entrepreneurially, to contribute their innovative strength to agile industrial projects, and to act in interdisciplinary project teams beyond traditional hierarchical structures and ways of thinking.

Support for these projects from Volkswagen, suppliers and other industry users is a key success factor for the success of this unique market initiative to increase the competitiveness of the automotive sector in Germany.

Co-creation and partner collaboration in industry projects is in the foreground

“We have a lot planned for year one! Our goal is to bring digital and AI innovation to life in the automotive and manufacturing sectors,” says Joerg Wicik, President & CEO of industrial.Digitalisation PartnerNet e.V. based in Wolfsburg, adding:

“With this unique market initiative, we are opening a “non-profit” partner collaboration platform and start-ups incubation organization in Germany with a focus on co-innovation of business ideas as well as co-creation of pioneer use cases & software solutions around digital-networked production ecosystem of the 4.0 future.

This enables fast and cost-effective testing of new business models and future-oriented digital use cases for intelligent and cross-functional networking of production, logistics, after-sales and N-tier supply chain.

We encourage start-ups, digital innovation pioneers and young entrepreneurs to turn their business ideas into concrete projects with industry users, and to realize them together on an equal footing. To this end, we have set up a digital@demonstrationSPACE through which partner offers are addressed to user use case needs, thus creating joint projects.

In this way, we are making an active contribution to creating new jobs in the region.”

Smart & Autonomous Factory focus to improve productivity, quality and cost structures

“The work of this new initiative is designed to help unlock further potential for efficiency gains, prevent unnecessary downtime and address more digital challenges in production,” says Dr. Jan Spies, Head of Production Planning at the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand.

Open source, open industry standards and semantic IIoT data model are the enablers 4.0

“For Ascon Systems, the founded organization offers an interesting platform to position our solutions even more broadly in the automotive industry.” Mathias Stach, Co-Founder and Managing Director Ascon Systems GmbH.

Digitization, AI & e-mobility innovation boost competitiveness of the automotive industry

The organization’s agenda includes specific Digital Innovation use cases and projects. These include: click here

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Jan 7, 2021

Innovation and technology support for Ascon Systems

Author

Kelly Lübbers

Head of Marketing

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Wissing: Mainz-based company Ascon Systems GmbH receives grant of 500,000 euros

The Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Economics supports the company Ascon Systems GmbH in its innovative project by means of the Rhineland-Palatinate Individual Company Innovation and Technology Support Program (InnoTop).

“Investments in research and development can contribute to sustainable economic growth and thus increase competitiveness,” said Dr. Volker Wissing, Rhineland-Palatinate’s Minister of Economic Affairs. “However, innovations involve a high novelty aspect, which is why projects carry a realization risk. The state funding is intended to help overcome this challenge,” Wissing said with regard to the signing of the grant notice.

In order for companies to be able to participate in the complex market environment in the long term and prevail over the competition, products and business models must be adapted to customer requirements at short intervals. Due to frequent configurations, time specifications shift, so that no clear cause-effect chain can be traced in manufacturing and production. The company Ascon Systems GmbH from Mainz would like to reform this and develop a digital solution for process change within the framework of the funded project, which makes it possible to plan, control and document in real time. The information processing created for this purpose is to be optimized as well as the necessary security functions researched so that the end product can be used in particular in the automotive industry, aircraft and machine construction as well as consumer goods manufacturing. The start-up, founded in 2017, opened its location in Mainz for the first time in April 2018, under the management of Michael Gänsler, and in addition to its main business of innovative software development, also offers student workshops on the technology concept “Digital Twin”.

“We are very pleased about the funding from the Ministry of Economics of Rhineland-Palatinate which helps us to reach our highly innovative product goals much earlier and furthermore to strengthen the location Mainz for Ascon Systems”, said Michael Gänsler, Managing Director of Ascon Systems GmbH.

As the state’s development bank, Investitions- und Strukturbank Rheinland-Pfalz (ISB) implements the program. “For companies in Rhineland-Palatinate, innovations and further technical developments are an essential adjusting screw for future success on the increasingly digitalized as well as globalized world market. Therefore, we are happy to contribute to mitigating the technical and financial risks of research and development projects and thus support SMEs,” explained ISB Board Member Dr. Ulrich Link.

The funding comes from the Ministry of Economics’ InnoTop technology support program, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Susanne Keeding
Spokesperson
Ministerium für Wirtschaft, Verkehr, Landwirtschaft und Weinbau
Tel. 06131/16-2550

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Dec 7, 2020

Award Winner: Company and Innovation

Winner of the Baden-Württemberg Innovation Prize 2020
(“Dr.-Rudolf Eberle Prize”)

Author

Kelly Lübbers

Head of Marketing

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Planning, control and analysis of a changeable and flexible production in real time – this is the dream of every production manager! The new development makes this possible through a comprehensive information model and a high-performance execution architecture. Thus, all information from the different planning systems and levels involved in production is linked to a continuous information management without having to define the individual semantic and ontological relationships in advance and without having to code software for it. Thus, the production process is mapped and controlled comprehensively, completely and adaptable at any time. The modelled value-added chains are executed directly, and even operating resources can be exchanged without changes in the control logic.

The starting position
Modular, adaptable systems require modular, adaptable information models, which carry from the design, over the planning up to the execution without media breaks. This applies not only to production and logistics, but also to other fields of application of the digital twin, for example in building and infrastructure management. Today, the digital twin is omnipresent, usually understood as a virtual image of a delimited real system, without any possibility of intervention or feedback from the virtual into reality. This is in contrast to the approach of the new development: Not only the characteristics, but above all the behavior of the virtual and the real part of the twin must be identical at all times, which must be coupled bidirectionally for this purpose. This is the only way to draw the right conclusions in the overall context of a manufacturing system at all times and to make decisions about the digital twin that are immediately implemented in the real system.

With today’s solutions, this is feasible with high effort and minimal flexibility in the best case for small and delimited plant components. However, this is not possible for more complex production plants, consisting of intercommunicating control systems, often from different manufacturers, because programs of programmable logic controllers (PLC) usually only map local behavior of individual plants. The construction of a true digital twin, which maps both the overall system properties and the individual behavior of the subsystems, is not feasible for an overall system extending over the levels of today’s hierarchical automation pyramid.

The Innovation
The unique selling point of the innovative Digital Twin is a context-based real-time behavioral model for synchronization of product development, planning and production. The disruptive technology (patent pending in Europe, the USA and Japan) enables the value streams in production and logistics to be controlled without PLC programming. Connected to all real machines and plants involved, all signal streams are captured in the context of the value-added processes and thus provide the perfect basis for analytics and artificial intelligence at the same time. The complete digital integration of production with all upstream and downstream processes paves the way to a highly networked, autonomous production: rigid, inflexible, hard-coded PLCs are replaced and the production and logistics flow is made flexible and changeable. Instead of external programming specialists, in-house planners and fabricators are used, change cycles take minutes instead of days and weeks. Regardless of which acquisition systems and which combination of information and signal sources are present in production, these signals, data and information can be integrated into the context of a continuous value-added model, combined with other data from product and process management and used in a coordinated manner to control production. Functional expansions and parameter changes are thus possible at short notice even after commissioning, without having to resort to external service providers again and again. Likewise, a retrofit with high quality and more flexibility can be mastered even without the purchase of completely new systems, the planning/implementation time is shortened, and the risk of undesired side effects is reduced. With the process description of the value chains, models that can be executed in real time on any distributed hardware of the control level, e.g. PLC, edge devices, cloud, are automatically created.

This allows the planner to test his processes and incorporate changes reliably during the first definition. The individual production plans for the single item to be produced are created “on-the-fly”. Exactly what was planned is executed without the need for a PLC programmer. The process description is based on modular function and process modules, which the user can take from a library or define himself, making planning and control of production easier and qualitatively better. This also supports computer-aided comparison with already modeled processes and continuous learning from and towards best practices. Complexity and unnecessary variance can thus be reduced. Due to the independence of the process logic from the logic of the executing hardware, only the technically necessary or manufacturer-specified part of the plant and process control remains there. All process elements for the orchestration and concatenation of the added value are described and processed in the execution model – an explicit realization on the PLC level is thus no longer absolutely necessary. Hardware can thus be exchanged without changing the control logic.

The company
Founded in 2017, Ascon Systems succeeded in a quick start with well-known customers and a wide range of applications: In the 3rd fiscal year, the company generated over 6.5 million Euro with 50 employees. In 2018 Gartner awarded the company the title of Global Cool Vendor Industry 4.0, in 2019 1st prize at the CyberOne Hightech Award Baden-Württemberg followed and in 2020 EY nominated Ascon for the final round of the Entrepreneur of the Year competition. Many publications have appeared about the company since its launch. In several financing rounds between April 2018 and March 2020 the investor capital required for growth was acquired.

The well-rehearsed team, which works closely with customers at the headquarters in Stuttgart and at the locations in Munich, Mainz, Wolfsburg and Stade, has many years of management experience from start-up to corporate structures and the necessary expertise in both manufacturing and IT consulting as well as software development.

Click here to read the full article.

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Nov 13, 2020

Ascon Systems is honored with the Innovation Award

Author

Kelly Lübbers

Head of Marketing

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Ascon Systems is honored with the Innovation Award

For the innovative Digital Twin of processes, plants and products Ascon Systems receives the Innovation Award 2020.

We are proud of this award and would like to take this opportunity to thank the entire expert committee and all participants for the successful virtual event.

Click here for the report of November 11, 2020.

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Oct 23, 2020

Ascon Systems is winner of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2020 in the category Young Companies

Author

Kelly Lübbers

Head of Marketing

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Press release
Dag-Stefan Rittmeister
Press and Public Relations
+49 711 9881 15980
dag-stefan.rittmeister@de.ey.com

EY honors innovative entrepreneurs with the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2020 Awards

Germany’s best entrepreneurs

• Ventilator and motor manufacturer ebm-papst wins in the “Established Companies” category
• Ascon Systems from Stuttgart receives the prize in the “Emerging Companies” category
• ebm-papst will represent Germany at the “World Entrepreneur Of The Year”

Stuttgart, 22 October 2020. The winners of the “EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2020” award demonstrate entrepreneurship, innovative strength and personal commitment. The prizes were awarded to entrepreneurs in the “Established Companies” and “Emerging Companies” categories on 22 October 2020. With this prize, the auditing and consulting firm EY has celebrated the best owner-managed, mid-sized German companies for the 24th time.

The winners were announced for the first time at a virtual awards ceremony, which was hosted by the newsreader Judith Rakers.

This year there were 19 finalists vying for the title of “Entrepreneur Of The Year 2019”, An independent jury shortlisted entrepreneurs for the title “EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2020”: The ventilator and motor manufacturer ebm-papst and the Industry 4.0 company Ascon Systems. Ebm-papst will also represent Germany at the “World Entrepreneur Of The Year” in the coming year.

The winners of “Entrepreneur Of The Year 2020” Established Companies: ebm-papst Group, Mulfingen, Germany Award accepted by: Gerhard Sturm, Ralf Sturm, Stefan Brandl

ebm-papst is a leading global manufacturer of ventilators and motors. The company ebm (Elektrobau Mulfingen GmbH & Co. KG) was founded in 1963 by Gerhard Sturm and Heinz Ziehl, and initially concentrated on producing small external rotor motors. Today, its portfolio includes ventilation technology, air conditioning and cooling technology, heating technology, the automotive industry, machine construction, information technology, gastronomy/household appliances, intralogistics and medical technology. For decades Gerhard Sturm has abided by the corporate philosophy that each newly developed product must be more ecological and economical than its predecessor. For example, under the label “GreenIntelligence” the company is looking towards new solutions in the future, which combine the highest levels of energy efficiency with the advantages of digital connectivity. For his social commitment and entrepreneurial activities, Sturm, who celebrated his 85th birthday last December, has received numerous honors – these include the German Federal Cross of Merit, the Medal of Merit of the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg and the Diesel Medal, the highest award for inventors. Globally, ebm-papst has around 15,000 employees spread over 29 production sites. In 2019/20, the hidden champion generated revenue of just under EUR 2.2 billion.

Emerging Companies: Ascon Systems GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany Award accepted by: Mathias Stach, Alexander von Klein, Kilian Grefen, Dr. Raimund Menges, Uwe Rettich

Ascon Systems also calls itself “The Digital Twin Company”. With digital twinning, the company has made it significantly easier to introduce and operate Industry 4.0. The technology combines planning, production, artificial intelligence and Big Data analyses, and allows companies to secure production plants as early as the planning stage, and monitor and optimize the way they work during ongoing operations. For this reason, in 2018 Ascon Systems was one of only four companies in the world to be included in the “Cool Vendor” list by Gartner, which honors new and innovative providers and products. The company was founded in 2017 and now employs around 80 employees at four locations.

About “EY Entrepreneur of the Year”

The “Entrepreneur of the Year” program was launched in the US in 1986. The competition has since spread to 60 countries and is among the most renowned entrepreneur awards worldwide. The German competition is taking place for the 24th time this year and is sponsored by leading companies and media organizations, including LGT, strategic communications consultancy Kekst CNC, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Manager Magazin. Besides honoring successful entrepreneurs, EY also promotes emerging entrepreneurial talent with its “EY NextGen Academy” program.

About EY

EY* is one of the largest professional services firms in Germany and the market leader in tax services. EY employs more than 11,000 people in 20 locations and generated revenue of EUR 2.1 billion in fiscal year 2018/2019. Joining forces with the roughly 300,000-strong global EY organization, it serves its clients all over the world.

EY offers large and medium-sized companies a comprehensive portfolio of services in the areas of assurance, tax, law, strategy and transactions, consulting and real estate advisory services.

For more information please visit the following website: www.de.ey.com.

Press contact:

Dag-Stefan Rittmeister, Head of Press and Public Relations
Ernst & Young GmbH
Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft
Flughafenstrasse 61, 70629 Stuttgart
Tel: +49 711 988 11 59 80
E-mail: dag-stefan.rittmeister@de.ey.com

*The name “EY” as used in this profile refers to all German member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited (EYG), a UK private company limited by guarantee. Each EYG member firm is a separate legal entity and has no liability for another such entity’s acts or omissions.

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