To obtaining the vision of unleashing the full innovation potential of European manufacturing industry, especially SMEs and Mid-Caps by addressing their intra-factory logistics challenges L4MS implemented an ambitious program structured in three main phases:
Phase1. Setting up the structures of the ecosystem (the prototype).
Phase2. Establishing and testing the Marketplace and Platform through Cross-border Application Experiments, creating the initial critical mass (the voice of customers).
Phase 3. Incorporation of L4MS as a startup to get a self-sustained and organically growing ecosystem of regional actors (CCs, DIHs, etc.) (the launch).
The project conducted 3 Pilot Experiments: Chemi Pharm from Estonia, Muraplast from Croatia, and Engino from Cyprus, and in addition to these, 21 Application Experiments (AE), from which 10 in the 1st Open Call and 10 within the 2nd Open Call. From the 20 AEs selected in Open Calls, 12 were selected to 2nd phase and from those 6 continued to 3rd phase and thus conducted the whole smartization programme. In addition to the Open Calls, 1 AE was selected from the joint open call between AMABLE and L4MS. Each selected AE teams consisted of one manufacturing SME (the end-user) and 1-2 technology providers. Each AE was supported by Competence Centres. Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EiRs) and CTO-in-Residence (CiR) were nominated for each to support their development work.
The selected teams in the AEs have followed three phases. In Phase 1, all AEs were supported to properly define the technical and business plan for the experiment execution. In Phase 2 the most outstanding experiments had 8 months to execute them and, finally, the most relevant ones in terms of impact, had 2 additional months to help them to scale up the result of the experiments. The results from the AEs have been used to create business success stories of the project (http://www.l4ms.eu/Pilots ).
OPIL components were developed in the project by Competence Centre partners and tested within altogether 15 Pilot and Application Experiments. The development was based on open-source components, such as those available in the FIWARE ecosystem and ROS framework, which concur to fulfil different purposes of OPIL. Towards the end of the project, OPIL was published under single Open Source license (Apache2). The source code of all OPIL modules has been made publicly available on GitHub (
https://github.com/ramp-eu(opens in new window)).
In addition to the software components, training Videos were made in L4MS YouTube Channel. Also, an extensive documentation regarding OPIL was created, coordinating material from different authors/module owners and was made available on RAMP marketplace (www.RAMP.eu).
L4MS Marketplace was branded as RAMP and strategic decision was made to combine the effort of creating a sustainable, business-based Marketplace with the other projects that jointly develop RAMP. The current main projects where RAMP is tested are DIH² (www.DIH-squared.eu) and Better Factory (www.BetterFactory.eu).
