Why robotics still doesn’t scale at SMEs – and what needs to change
Jens Fetzer - Senior Vice President, Digital Factory Solutions
The presentation demonstrates that robotics is technologically highly advanced, yet often fails to scale in practice because the real bottleneck lies in engineering, not in the robot itself. Instead of focusing on hardware or the process, the emphasis is placed on setup effort, programming, and the dependency on specialists, which make many projects uneconomical or slow them down. Building on this, it is argued that robotics can only become scalable if these upstream processes are standardized, decoupled, and consistently digitized, meaning they function seamlessly from design through to production without media discontinuities. The key message: the greatest leverage for successful automation does not lie in new hardware, but in the industrialization of engineering. And this is exactly where it is decided who can deploy robotics economically and at scale.