During last century, the investments in automation focused on optimising resources and costs and converging towards ever more Lean Production. Due to volatile changes in the business environment manufacturers started to look for more agility in their factories. In last decades, a significant public and private investment has been made in the development of several enabling technologies for Agile Production. Today, many products can be personalized to the very last detail for individual customers on the same production line with no impact on the production cost. However, for Manufacturing SMEs to adopt optimal Lean‐Agile Production and enter the market with new or personalized product and services, they face several challenges.
Better Factory aimed to answer to 4 challenges:
#1: Creativity Challenge - Before adopting new business models and investing into factories for new or personalized products, SMEs need to reinvent their products for customization, around the core value proposition of the product and around the core knowledge of the SME.
#2: Lean-Agile Challenge - To produce batches of new and personalized products, alongside existing products SMEs will require more from their factories. Factories will need to operate as fully connected Lean‐Agile cyber‐physical‐systems, minimizing the use of resources, and simultaneously reconfiguring Human‐Robot‐Interaction while keeping the constraints on quality, delivery, time, etc.
#3: Investment Challenge - Arts drive science and science drive arts and a combination of these drive innovation. The artists can spur new innovations on the path to digital transformation with manufacturing SMEs, as well as explore new horizons with Technology suppliers. Yet, full exploitation of these unpredictable innovations will rely on the access to finance.
#4: Skills Challenge - Transformation process of a conventional factory requires transformation of organisational design and enterprise architecture that embrace convergence of multiple advance technologies. This requires strategic thinking, simulation, planning and re‐skilling.
Better Factory invited Small and Medium-sized Manufacturers (SMEs) to redesign their current production and product portfolio together with Artists and Technology suppliers in 16 months Knowledge Transfer Experiments (KTE). Manufacturers taped into disruptive product innovation that responds to new market demands while keeping production resources optimal with RAMP IoT platform. It helped manufacturers to enter new markets with customizable, personalized product or service portfolio. Together the members of sixteen Knowledge Transfer Experiments discovered new business models and digitalised their factories to match the production of new or personalized products. All in all, 48 companies developed and tested 50 new technical and artistic solutions and planned for their commercial exploitation after the project.
RAMP (Robotics Automation Marketplace) is a free and open marketplace and IoT platform running on state of the art servers, with access to cloud storage and computing, enabling connection with robots, sensors, cameras, AR/VR and other equipment. RAMP provides a 3D simulation tool to create Digital Twin for virtual testing, co-creation space for teams to collaborate online among other digital services. Managed by European Dynamics, RAMP continues to run also after the project.
Better Factory provides an Open and Standardized Advance Production Planning and Scheduling (APPS) system for manufacturers to test commercial tools to optimize waste, energy, resources and logistic. The Better Factory originally developed 10 APPS tools. These were tested and integrated in the solutions developed in the Knowledge transfer experiments. An additional 10 APPS were developed by the KTEs
