Hannover Messe is undoubtedly the flagship trade fair in the world on industrial products, held every year in April, in the trade fair city of Hannover in Germany. In fact, this fair is as important to Industrial Products, as Olympics are to Sports ! Like in previous years, this year too, the Deutsche Messe Team organised a preview of the fair on 6^th Februrary, to showcase a few selected exhibitors and exhibits, the ones which might steal the limelight in the fair proper. The obvious objective of such preview is to gain global traction for the forthcoming fair itself, by highlighting the items that might be of special interest to the potential visitors. This year, the Messe is being held concurrently with CeMAT 2018, a logistics, packaging and supply chain event, and therefore, this joint congregation is expected to draw even larger attention. Almost forgot to mention that this year Mexico is the partner country for the exhibition. So, while walls may be coming up on their US border, doors are opening up for Mexico, in Europe, evidenced by the fact that number of Mexican exhibitors has gone up from a mere 5, to more than 150 in this edition of the fair. Primarily, Mexico’s presentations will be expected to promote investments into that country.

This year, there were in all 38 exhibits in the preview, and at least a good 4 or 5 of them showcased logistics related products or services. The presentations by Toyota and SAP come to mind in the logistics space. Latest offerings to optimise supply chains will be of great interest to Indian visitors to the fair, since our country is currently going through a period of transformation in logistics, what with implementation of GST, blooming of e commerce and e tailing activities and gradual improvement of infrastructure. “Factories of the Future”, famously ascribed the strategic name of Industrie 4.0 in earlier editions of Hannover Fairs, need Logistics 4.0 in order to be successful, and it is expected that concurrent holding of CeMAT will provide invaluable inputs to practitioners. For example, concepts like “Autonomous Fork Lift Trucks” hold the promise of revolutionising warehouse mechanics for good.

This need of collaboration between manufacturing and logistics is truly reflected in this year’s lead theme, which is Connect and Collaborate, and this beautiful expression could also be hinting at collaboration between the machine and the man, people and robots, besides talking about the synergy between “state of the art” manufacturing and “state of the art” packaging/logistics. It will be very very interesting to discover, how this theme expresses itself in the full version of the fair including CeMAT.

(This report was filed by Sumit Banerjee, Chairman, ASAPP Info Global Services Pvt Ltd, who was at Hannover Messe Preview 2018 on invitation from Deutsche Messe AG)