TÜV SÜD operates new eCl@ss Office in Korea

Created by Arany Sarkar | TÜV SÜD Korea | 08/07/2020

Aranya Sarkar, Head of Operations for Advanced Manufacturing at TÜV SÜD Korea, in an interview

Aranya, please explain: What is TÜV SÜD Korea and what’s your mission?

TÜV SÜD’s business in Korea started in 1992 when TÜV Bayern worked with Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company to conduct consultancy for mechanical engineering companies on quality management. We mainly offered management system certification services according to ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. Eventually, the demand for our services increased so much that we set up 2 official local branch offices in October 1994. Over the years, TÜV SÜD Korea expanded its business scope to the automotive, railway, electrical and electronic products, medical devices, power plants, real estate and infrastructure, and manufacturing sectors. The company has made several investments to build up its local competency – Busan office in 1997, Guro testing laboratory in 2006, and a battery testing laboratory in Suwon, 2014. The battery testing laboratory marked the first independent laboratory for medium and large-scale rechargeable batteries of the global TIC players in Korea. TÜV SÜD Korea Academy provides training paths to support the growth of individuals and organizations, whether in one of our public training programs or in customized in-house solutions for the automotive, functional safety, medical devices, management systems, energy, cybersecurity sectors.

Today, we are represented by more than 130 employees across 4 locations, providing a wide range of technical service solutions for various industries. It has since established a solid reputation for partnering customers in their business process, helping them achieve global market acceptance for their products and systems.

In which industries are the companies associated with TÜV SÜD Korea located?

TÜV SÜD Korea is a one stop technical solution provider and we are serving majority of the industries that we can find around us. Some of the industries in which we are deeply associated are automotive, machinery and industrial machinery sector, electrical & IT, digital & IT, rail, real estate and infrastructure.

Why are standardized product master data and standardized classification important to you?

We, at Advanced Manufacturing, are dealing with the manufacturing sector in particular and are dealing with the future solutions that are going to be necessary in the evolving landscape of Industry 4.0. In the smart manufacturing context, the semantically standardized exchange of digital data, the transformation of data to information is crucial. This means, we need to record to data throughout the lifecycle of an asset now. But the important fact is - ‘recording’ does not solve any purpose, if the data cannot be interpreted in an understandable way. Hence, we need to utilized a standardized product master data with standard classification. This is true even in the case of evolving safety scenario for smart manufacturing and we envision a concept called ‘smart safety’ that can only be enabled by a standard library like eCl@ss.

Why is the eCl@ss Standard especially for the Korean market of importance? Why did TÜV SÜD Korea decide for eCl@ss?

The awareness of the eCl@ss Standard is still very limited in Korea and is only well-known among the research circles. With the fast adoption of smart factory enablers in Korea, eCl@ss is slowly gaining traction as more and more organizations start to realize the importance of semantic machine-readable data libraries. As the Korean market is looking out for a machine-readable library that can address their requirements of a standardized data format for digital exchange of product descriptions and service descriptions, proper awareness campaigns and demonstrations will be vital at this point.

TÜV SÜD is now developing the methodologies to handle the evolving safety ecosystem due to the wide adoption of smart manufacturing technologies. The new inter-connected production scenarios require machine-readable safety properties, dynamic risk assessments, real-time safety evaluations and run-time certifications. Couple of basic building blocks towards enabling this concept are digital twins and standardized semantics for machine to machine communication by transforming data into information. The eCl@ss data library fulfills these requirements and is helping TÜV SÜD to create the future of safety evaluations in manufacturing.

What are the benefits of the collaboration between TÜV SÜD Korea and the eCl@ss association?

TÜV SÜD Korea is serving as the eCl@ss regional Office in Korea. TÜV SÜD Korea has previously worked with Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI) on a research project for developing digital twin demonstrations for the manufacturing industry, where eCl@ss has been used extensively and the real value of eCl@ss could be understood in the context of Industry 4.0. The major intention of TÜV SÜD Korea is to spread awareness in the Korean market about eCl@ss by showing real demonstrations and fostering wide adoption of the standard. The association with the eCl@ss association is bi-directional for TÜV SÜD. On one side, as mentioned previously, we believe that eCl@ss can solve some of our challenges in developing the future of safety - ‘smart safety’ - and on the other, TÜV SÜD’s global presence can help greater adoption of the eCl@ss Standard worldwide.

Which solution can you provide as official eCl@ss Office Korea to your customers?

The eCl@ss Office in Korea is currently well equipped to provide initial consultations to customers, do detailed concept review and business case analysis for the utilization of eCl@ss. We can support the customers in Korea in adopting eCl@ss for their business processes through the network of the IT service partners of the eCl@ss association. Additionally, we are releasing newsletters and organizing public webinars at regular intervals focused on usage of eCl@ss for digital twins.

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