Scheid IT partnership with Rehm Group causes Conflict of Interest
RESITCO, a joint venture between Rehm Thermal Systems and Scheid IT formed in 2025 has highlighted partiality concerns with the Hermes Standard Chairman.
Scheid IT GmbH, trading as SIT Solutions, produces the SMEMA Hermes Bridge also known as Selma. It converts SMEMA signals into Hermes messages to retrofit IPC-Hermes-9852 onto existing legacy SMEMA based SMT manufacturing equipment.
This is similar functionality to our SMEMA Hermes Adaptor and SICK's Hermes SMEMA Connect. Siemens also produces software libraries for their PLCs targeted at OEMs used in new and legacy machines.
Markus Scheid, CEO of Scheid IT and now RESITCO has always had a close working relationship with Rehm Thermal Systems.
He has worked with them as a freelancer creating software solutions and is often part of the Hermes Standard working group who makes decisions based on member's proposals.
The relationship between Scheid IT and Rehm has always been known and informal. At the end of the day people know people and word-of-mouth is a great sales tool. The integration of the new business into the Rehm Group now makes their relationship formal.
We have sold 300+ Adaptors to 30 countries based on word-of-mouth and I'm sure informal recommendations from people we have known from in our past or contacts made at trade shows.
The new version of SMEMA Hermes Bridge featuring its new form factor was on display at last year's Productronica on the Rehm booth. It's powered by the Raspberry Pi Compute Module meaning it is compatible with our own Hermes software.
We decided to use the more common Raspberry Pi 4 for our SMEMA Hermes Adaptor to be assured that supply would always be maintained.
With Covid-19 and the memory shortages created by AI Data Centers disrupting supply, we were wrong on that one.
Conflict of Interest
The Conflict of Interest occurs when the Hermes Standard Chairman also works for Rehm Thermal Systems. If approached by a cold call, What would he recommend as an IPC-Hermes-9852 retrofit device?
Markus Mittermair became chairman of the Hermes Standard of the Hermes Standard in 2022 taking over from Håkan Sandell of Mycronic. Markus is Head of Software Development at Rehm Thermal Systems.
Becoming Chairman is something I have considered over the years considering the majority of my working week is taken up with Hermes related work. But for the same reason, it would be wrong of me to become the hub of the committee with people contacting me seeking advice and recommendations.
While machine builders see the Hermes Standard as a side project, our revenue comes directly from it.
Optics
I have been critical of the transparency of the governance of the Hermes Standard for some time. The website is out of date, there is no list of member’s names or email addresses so I can't contact anyone. There is no contact details of the chair or the working group on the website. There are outstanding Github Issues and Hermes Proposals etc etc which are damaging to the optics of progression to the Standard. I had hoped that moving to IPC Works would at least correct these issues and give us a restart.
While I'm sure no malpractice is occurring, long periods of poor communication coupled with what is noted above can lead to reasonable paranoia.
I will contact the Chair to raise my concerns.
About 4IR.UK British Systems
We are a Smart Factory solutions provider for the SMT Electronics Assembly manufacturing industry. We were founded in 2016 after the support of a seed funded Business Accelerator. We create hardware Adaptors that operate in more than 20 countries that extend the life of SMEMA based manufacturing equipment by providing solutions for production monitoring and supporting data connections to the Hermes Standard and the Connected Factory Exchange CFX. We also develop Software Extensions for the Low-Code No-Code MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform. The flexibility of off-the-shelf software combined with inside industrial experience means that 4IR.UK is ideally placed to anticipate and respond to a factory's changing needs.
