B&R (Bernecker and Rainer Industrie-Elektronik) are set to have €100m invested into their business by recent owners ABB, who plan on creating a major new innovation campus.
The investment at the site at Egglesberg, Austria, is reportedly the largest single project in industrial automation all throughout the company’s 130 year history.
The new project is set to create around 1000 new jobs, and is a key part of the company’s broader expansion strategy. At present, this totals $1.4bn in annual research and development.
The business, which produces a host of systems used within the confectionery and bakery sectors, pointed out that the new innovation and training campus will be integral to developing technologies for the factory of the future, all of which will be based on ABB AbilityTM.
Smart and cloud-connected machines and robots will undertake this task autonomously.
Alongside already ultra-modern R&D laboratories, the brand new research and development campus is set to cover 35,000 m2, and will house a number of state-of-the-art facilities.
These new facilities will be used to test and develop brand new automation technologies, which will range from industrial colour systems all the way up to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
There will also be an Automation Academy put in place to directly train and educate partners, employees and customers.
The new campus is set to be fully functional in the course of 2020, while there is a ground-breaking ceremony pencilled in the diary for this summer.
Upon completion, the Eggeslberg site will be one of the largest research and development centres at ABB’s disposal.
