(The following article by Matthew Yi was posted on the San Francisco Chronicle website on May 19.)
SAN FRANCISCO — For a global engineering giant showing off its latest technology in automated manufacturing, German conglomerate Siemens rolled into San Francisco on Tuesday in an unlikely mode of transportation: a 200-year-old invention called the railroad.
The 14-car train named “Exider” — outfitted with 224 flat-panel displays, 189 DVD players and almost 2 miles of data lines — pulled into the Caltrain station for a one-day visit before chugging along to Seattle. “Our customers, they don’t always have time to go to exhibitions or trade shows,” said Aubert Martin, president and chief executive officer of Siemens Energy & Automation Inc., one of eight subsidiaries of Siemens. “We wanted to bring our technology closer to our customers.”
And coming to the United States hasn’t been exactly easy. After a tour through Europe and China, the train was supposed to be shipped, but a typhoon got in the way, and eventually Siemens decided to hire a Ukrainian air cargo company to fly the train from Hawaii to Milwaukee.
Siemens, which recorded sales of $80 billion last year, is spending about $16 million for the tech train marketing push. This pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars tech firms can spend in marketing and advertising.
“It’s out of the box,” Martin said standing next to the blue-and-white train. “It’s a good way to demonstrate our technology.”
Stepping into the first car, visitors are surrounded by a 3-D multimedia presentation of flashing lights, flat-panel displays and a conveyor belt that takes them closer to the large screen in the far end of the car, then back.
“Whoa, this is better than Disneyland!” said Richard Randall, 50, a manager at Santa Clara Windustrial, which makes and sells a wide variety of industrial pipes.
The other presentations demonstrate Siemens products for industrial applications ranging from beer bottling to manufacturing automobiles.
The train’s No. 4 car contained a virtual golf ball factory that demonstrated how manufacturing can be streamlined by pinpointing inventory of three different colored balls through production, warehouse, packaging and shipping. The system then automatically adjusts the production level of each type of product on the fly.
Douglas Williams, 28, director of project development at Kirell Energy Systems in San Jose, said he was sold on Siemens software that not only controls energy usage in a factory or building, but tracks how much money is saved after certain cost-control measures are taken. It’s the kind of thing that he thinks chief financial officers would love to see.
“It’s pretty neat,” he said. “You actually see how much money you are saving.”
While the train is open to anyone who preregisters online, Siemens had a long list of customers and potential customers, Martin said.
The train started rolling two years ago in a 10-country European tour. Last year, it steamed over to Russia and China. In February, it was shipped, flown and eventually transported to Chicago’s McCormick Center for National Manufacturing Week. That started a 10-city U.S. tour that also included stops in Mexico.
Despite the shrinking manufacturing base in the United States, the American market is important for Siemens, Martin said.
“We believe in the U.S. market. It’s the largest market (representing about 20 percent of Siemens’ overall sales) for us outside Europe,” he said. “Manufacturing can stay in the United States, but you have to be innovative. .. . It’s about cost savings and being more efficient through automation.”
The train’s next stop is Seattle on May 24. The tour ends in Montreal later this summer.