The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance aims to enable up to 80 percent of the machines in a Smart Factory to communicate with each other. The goal is to overcome proprietary isolated solutions in order to give a decisive boost to the end-to-end digital transformation in the industry. The founding of the alliance was announced in April 2019. Since then, the alliance has grown to more than 40 members with different industrial core competencies. In October 2019, the association behind the Alliance was founded to further strengthen the official character of the alliance. In addition to KUKA, the founding members include Beckhoff, Endress+Hauser, Hilscher, ifm, MULTIVAC, SAP, Tetra Pak and Voith. In the meantime, around 32 other companies have joined the Alliance as members.