The Made Smarter programme has recently published a new ‘digital transformation roadmap’ to support SME manufacturers with the complex challenges of adopting new technology within their businesses.
Made Smarter was created following an industry-led review of how UK manufacturing industries could be supported to prosper through digital tools and innovation. It is comprised of two key elements; Made Smarter Adoption, which offers practical support and funding to assist businesses with implementing new technology, and Made Smarter Innovation which aims to use research to tackle the current and future challenges to successful digitalisation in UK manufacturing.
In their latest whitepaper, the Made Smarter team have highlighted the process of how they support SME manufacturers with digital transformation through grant funding and skills and leadership training programmes. The report showcases some of the hundreds of businesses who have benefitted from their intervention across the country.
The paper also includes features on several partner organisations such as Make UK, the Centre for People-Led Digitalisation (PLD) and InterAct. Find out more about how we, and others, are working with Made Smarter towards a common goal and access links to the best resources available to start your digital transformation journey today.
Are you running a UK manufacturing business and looking to embark on a digital transformation journey? If so, this free whitepaper is the perfect place to start.
Aimed at ambitious SMEs it acts as a guide, explaining the concepts of digitisation, digitalisation, digital transformation, and continuous improvement.
Made Smarter help manufacturers better understand and navigate current and future trends and make the case for how industrial digital technologies can solve problems and create growth opportunities.
This whitepaper explains the process of how we support SME manufacturers with digital transformation through grant funding and skills and leadership training programmes. It also showcases some of the hundreds of businesses who have benefitted from our intervention across the country.
Finally, hear from Made Smarter partner organisations such as Make UK, the Centre for People-Led Digitalisation (PLD) and InterAct on how they are working with Made Smarter towards a common goal and find links to the best resources available to get you started with digital transformation today.
In June 2024, InterAct researchers visited Singapore as the first of several ‘Global Insight Missions’ aimed at uncovering new perspectives and knowledge from the global manufacturing ecosystem. This visit enabled the team to engage with the manufacturers, technology providers and support organisations that have driven Singapore’s advanced industrial development.
Manufacturing is not an isolated industry, tethered to any one country. To fully appreciate the scale of the challenges and opportunities for the global manufacturing ecosystem, it is essential we exchange knowledge with international partners and businesses. Our goal is to understand the competitive advantages of other countries, learn from them, and collaborate to share best practices and processes. This will help engaged stakeholders to address the challenges of digital transformation across three key areas: ecosystems, economies, and workplaces.
As part of our first global mission to Singapore, the InterAct team had the opportunity to visit a wide range of manufacturing and technology organisations such as:
Additionally, InterAct hosted a collaborative workshop event in partnership with the ARTC, SIMTech, and the JTC Corporation sharing research generated from the Network’s Future of Work and Future of Digital Manufacturing Ecosystems projects, alongside insights on Singapore’s approach to digitalisation and sustainability.
Why visit Singapore?
This mission provided extensive opportunities to develop an enhanced understanding of the Singaporean approach to the process of digitalisation and manufacturing futures. Several key factors motivated the choice of Singapore as a destination for this initial visit:
Singapore is recognised as an exemplar of successful economic growth. A significant aspect of this success is the role that the Singaporean government has played in shaping the nation’s economic system through an industrial strategy (WIPO, 2022).
The strategy “AI for the Public Good, for Singapore and the World” was launched in 2023. This initiative aims to position Singapore as a “Smart Nation” to embrace digital transformation through driving global innovation (Smart Nation, 2024).
Singapore is a hub for global manufacturers because they have access to talent, political stability, and geographical advantages for entering Southeast Asian Markets (Knight Frank, 2024).
Singapore is also a start-up hub placed as second only after Silicon Valley (Heo, 2021).
Public institutions assist people in upskilling and reskilling for emerging jobs. Singapore significantly outperformed many European countries in the training participation rate among unemployed residents aged 25 to 64 (Ministry of Manpower, 2023).
Building a better global manufacturing future, together
InterAct hosted an event supported by the Knowledge Transfer Office of the ARTC and SIMTech – two institutes belonging to the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). This workshop was delivered with local stakeholders from both local and multinational manufacturing companies in Singapore.
Organisations participating in the event included 3M, Mitsubishi, Edwards, Kowa Skymech, and Halliburton. The practitioners and stakeholders shared their challenges, drivers, and ambitions for achieving a sustainable digital transformation in the future.
Participants had the opportunity to explore ideas and visions around the future of the manufacturing sector, with particular emphasis on what they believed like scenarios and key drivers of innovation would be, highlighting factors such as:
Singapore’s government is encouraging workers to develop skills and upgrade their proficiencies.
Singapore is a hub for businesses and provides the infrastructure to develop digital capabilities.
They are accelerating the pace of automation and building new autonomous technology access.
A recurrent theme was the aim for workers to be more efficient, dynamic, and sustainable.
They highlighted that the key gaps to achieve these primary targets are generating workplace competency, encouraging people to work with technology, and the contrast of individual mindsets vs the national outlook.
Key insights on Singapore’s manufacturing future
The Advanced Manufacturing Training Academy (AMTA) in Singapore is supporting companies in transforming their human capabilities through a sustainable upskilling programme: ‘Learn, Practise, and Implement’. This programme is anticipating the future of workforce roles and skills.
Due to its lack of natural resources, Singapore’s competitive advantage is its people. They focus on education by upskilling and reskilling their workforce, supported by the government. By developing new training in partnership with local institutions, Singapore is enhancing their digital capabilities for the future.
Government funding and support are key to encouraging companies to pursue digital transformation and engage their high-level managers in upskilling and reskilling programmes.
Roles are evolving, and manufacturing companies need more entrepreneurial and innovative leaders on the shop floor to make real-time decisions.
Cybersecurity and sustainability are prominent challenges for SMEs in the manufacturing industry. In the UK, there is a need for an integrated vision where the enhancement of human factors is aligned with sustainability.
MNEs from the manufacturing industry are relocating to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, where they benefit from more physical space and available human resources.
Due to the labour gap in Singapore, headquarters located in this market are accelerating processes and driving digital transformation for MNEs.
Robots are enhancing working conditions by promoting a cleaner and safer environment for workers.
Singapore is ranked 2nd worldwide for robot adoption, while the UK ranks 28th.
Employees are encouraged to generate ideas, which are implemented through internal and external funding, creating an ecosystem of actionable intelligence.
The accumulation of skills is crucial for transferring knowledge to future generations and building human capability.
Singapore has an ambitious decarbonisation plan, despite challenges such as limited territory; importing 90% of its food, 50% of its water, and facing 30% risk of land submergence. They have established a ‘Green Skills Committee’ and are implementing the ‘Green Economy Regulatory Initiative’.
Singapore is prioritising “extended producer responsibility” to achieve a circular economy.
The InterAct team kicked off a series of InterAct Global research missions with a visit to Singapore at the end of June 2024. InterAct Global is expansion of the project, designed to bring insights from international manufacturing and technological innovation to the UK sector. This visit enabled the team to engage with the manufacturers, technology providers and support organisations that have driven Singapore’s industrial development.
InterAct is hoping to create both local and global impact by exchanging knowledge with international players in the worldwide manufacturing ecosystem. These missions will help to better understand the competitive advantages of other countries, learn from them, and exchange best practices and processes. Providing these insights to UK businesses and policymakers, the project aims to tackle the future challenges of digital transformation across three key areas: ecosystems, economies, and workplaces.
Singapore represents an interesting case study for innovation, with a strong track record of economic growth and clearly defined strategies for industrial development. The nation’s role as a hub for trade, finance and technology in the region demonstrates the potential benefits of a unified approach. The team had the chance to explore this in more depth through visits to various organisations and companies including:
InterAct had the chance to expand upon these visits and discussions with a full day workshop hosted at the ARTC, bringing together staff from various additional businesses, including M, Mitsubishi, Edwards and Kowa Skymech.
This engaging session offered participants the chance to hear from both InterAct Co-directors and A*STAR staff as they discussed:
Building the next-gen workforce: Professor Jillian MacBryde’s session highlighting the importance of talent acquisition, development, and reskilling to bridge the skills gap.
Digital transformation: Professor Janet Godsell’s talk shed light on creating efficient digital ecosystems within supply chains and manufacturing landscapes.
AI-powered future: Dr. Haiyue Zhu showcased cutting-edge AI-powered smart robotics and the transformative potential of automation.
Singapore’s decarbonisation roadmap: Daren Tan outlined Singapore’s ambitious plans for decarbonisation, addressing environmental challenges head-on.
Attendees also contributed to an extended shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities for the manufacturing sector through two workshops built around the approaches of the InterAct Future of Work and Future of Digital Manufacturing Ecosystems teams.
We want to thank all of our generous hosts and partners for the success of this mission, and look forward to bringing more insights from our further global engagement activities.
We hear a lot about the impact of Industry 4.0 in manufacturing, but it can be a complex and thorny issue to definitively explain. The term has become synonymous with smart manufacturing and the introduction of new digital technologies within the sector. Technologists talk about the Internet of Things (IoT), AI and machine learning, robotics or the power of cloud computing, but what does it all mean?
InterAct welcomed Dr. Olivér Kovács of the Ludovika University of Public Services, Budapest to an online session on 23rd May to share his insights on the 4th Industrial Revolution, how technological change can be accomplished and what key barriers to innovation remain.
Dr. Kovács is a Hungarian economist whose research embraces two fields:
Sustainable development through the lens of complexity science (including structural change, techno-economic paradigm shifts, Industry 4.0, state fiscal sustainability and the theoretical and empirical issues of fiscal policy and fiscal consolidations)
Innovation and innovation policy
He has been a member of public body of Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2015 (Economics and Law Section of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Committee on World Economics and Development Studies), a member of the EuroMoney Expert Panel since 2010, and a member of the Darwin Club for Social Sciences which is equipped with the idea of applying evolutionary and complexity approaches to socio-economic phenomena.
Dr. Kovacs has published several books including:
Stability and Dynamism – Fundamentals of Innovative Fiscal Policy
Complexity Economics: Economic Governance, Science and Policy
Reversing the Great Suppression – Unleashing the Catalytic Public Sector for Innovation Dynamism
You can watch the full session on our YouTube channel.
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated significant difficulties in producing vital healthcare equipment, including ventilators. As the probability of another virus outbreak is expected to reach 27% in the next decade, it is crucial to develop manufacturing capabilities for initiating emergency production with greater speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. In this article, Nikolai Kazantsev from the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) at the University of Cambridge suggests three steps to building pandemic preparedness. He draws on their recent study which offers insight into how UK manufacturers can navigate uncertain periods and contribute to critical public health initiatives.
Takeaways:
During a pandemic, it is necessary to reconfigure supply chains for emergency production.
Preparedness can be facilitated through three key steps:
Identifying products and components necessary to fulfil human needs.
Mapping manufacturing capabilities across supply chains for a potential response.
Developing an AI model to triage production options when the pandemic starts.
Government investment in pandemic preparedness will prevent delays, improve quality, and reduce recovery costs.
Preparing for future pandemics
The UK’s National Risk Register (2023) has identified a future pandemic as one of the five most probable catastrophic risks. Future pandemics could have critical negative impacts on human health, particularly cardiac and digestive health, with the potential to disrupt water and food systems. With the World Health Organization continuing to discuss the potential of unknown diseases of high contamination and mortality that can trigger a pandemic worldwide (a so-called ‘Disease X’), novel efforts are needed to prepare the manufacturing sector for future emergency production.
Up to now, most of the focus on pandemic preparedness has been on developing vaccine technology platforms for future virus strains and antibiotics for bacteria, especially considering the threat of antimicrobial resistance. However, what has been neglected is the local manufacturing capabilities to produce the quantity and variety of supplies required to deal with pandemic impacts. These capabilities should be able to meet potential production needs and guarantee that every patient in need of medical equipment can access it even during the peak of a crisis.
Emergency product designs must be safe to use and fit for purpose rather than complex and stylish. It is also essential to learn how to triage existing manufacturing capabilities at the outset of any pandemic outbreak, considering quality, lead times, and production scale-up costs. Moreover, emergency production planning should consider the risks of individual factory disruption and related component scarcity. The aim is to facilitate the development of supply chains capable of responding to the likely or quasi-certain emergence of demand and fluctuations therein for emergency products beyond those previously produced within supply chains.
Case study: Emergency consortia across supply chains
Ventilator production in the UK during COVID-19 has produced much knowledge of scaling up emergency equipment. In March 2020, the Cabinet Office identified the urgent need to manufacture healthcare ventilators to support critically ill patients’ breathing functions. Working in collaboration with clinicians and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, they developed the specifications for the Rapidly Manufactured Ventilator System. Because no single company could handle the emergency production on its own, this could have been overcome only through consortium effort. Emergency consortia are networks ‘wider’ than existing supply chains, which aggregate various capabilities to respond to unmet demand during disruptions that have a broad resonance, such as pandemics. Consortia are built around the required product components (e.g. a bill of materials for ventilator production) and often include companies that are non-traditional to the medical industry, such as aerospace and automotive manufacturers, technology providers, manufacturers, and third-party logistics firms.
For example, ‘Ventilator Challenge UK’ (VC UK) consortium was an example of a massive achievement that produced in 12 weeks over half of all the ventilators made available to the NHS during the pandemic. Focused on a desire to save lives, VC UK led the way in digital innovation, leveraging technology such as a digital twin of the production process, simulation of production facilities, and the use of “augmented reality” glasses to train 3,500 assembly workers, all while adhering to strict social distancing measures. From VC UK’s success, one still has much to learn about how to plan emergency production faster, better, and cheaper in the eventuality of another pandemic. For example, as there was no approved emergency product design, the first 29 days of the project were spent on redesigning the similar product (anaesthesia machine) to meet the functionality and safety scale-up needs of the ventilator specification. Moreover, this redesign faced multiple bottlenecks at the component level that limited the pace of emergency production scale-up and required continuous constraint optimisation.
Building a process of future pandemic preparedness
Based on the case study, three steps for manufacturers have been suggested: (1) identifying products and components necessary to fulfil human needs; (2) mapping UK manufacturing capabilities across supply chains to deploy capacity for these products; (3) developing a tool to triage options when the pandemic starts.
Production needs
According to the ‘Futures Wheel’toolkit, recommended by the Government Office for Science, a pandemic is an example of an event that creates cascading causal effects. While a pandemic can take various forms, the population will need similar functions, such as preventing contamination (the direct consequences of that risk), supporting primary care (‘second order’) or sustaining critical human functions within intensive care (‘third order’ consequences). For example, first, second and third-order consequences of the pandemic risk bring the following production needs:
Need to prevent contamination: PPE, water filters, sanitisers, and disinfectants.
Need to support primary care: vaccines and antibiotic medicine.
Need to support intensive care: ventilators and other ICU equipment.
Design and production specialists/ physicians and hospital experts should confirm what equipment and designs will be needed in any epidemic affecting patients’ vital functions. However, it is not enough simply to identify emergency products. These products must be certified as fit-for-purpose during a future pandemic, ensuring safety and quality, and adaptability in the expectation of potential shortages. Paradoxically, the better 1st order emergency production (for preventingcontamination), and 2nd order production (primary care), the less one would need (far more) complex 3rd order emergency production.
Moreover, building similar consequences after other risks from the National Risk Register and overlapping production needs can help prioritise production preparedness covering the greatest number of risks.
Manufacturing capabilities
A rapid roll-out of emergency products requires capabilities to deploy manufacturing capacity close to demand. Recent evidence from the US suggests that systematic investments in a combination of local inventories, manufacturing capacities, and capabilities produce the best response to the pandemic. Hence, the potential emergency products and their components should be mapped with the existing list of inventories, capacities, and manufacturing capabilities. That will facilitate simulations of demand for emergency equipment driven by potential pandemics and calculations of the number of emergency products manufactured to meet this (the lead time of ‘Ventilator Challenge UK’ production during COVID-19 was three months). For example, if there is a demand for 30,000 cardio stimulators – How quickly can this be satisfied locally, i.e., without reliance on imports? What would be the lead time/costs? The outcomes can be presented using technology such as the augmented reality platforms (industrial metaverse), to better interpret and explain these simulations.
To improve emergency production results, preparatory efforts must include identifying similar products and equipment, in addition to developing cross-disciplinary skills across large firms’ medical and engineering specialisms that may be reused for emergency production. Smaller firms must be supported in undergoing certification protocols to become regular suppliers to the NHS through their normal procurement framework.
Triage options
The future pandemic is expected to impact various parts of global supply chains, particularly in densely populated regions. Unfortunately, predicting which factories within supply chains will be disrupted and which components might become unavailable is impossible. However, under pandemic conditions, most companies, especially those in unaffected areas, are likely to be willing to help. As new manufacturing capabilities become available, efforts should focus on developing an adaptable AI model to align existing capabilities with risks and offer practical solutions to address supply chain bottlenecks for emergency production.
Such a model can base on the AI tools, which helps match production needs with manufacturing capabilities and can suggest new connections between components. By integrating manufacturing capabilities for emergency product, AI can help to infer real options across supply chains after the pandemic starts and arrange those considering costs, lead time, or carbon dioxide emission. For example, AI tool can suggest alternative inventories, factories, or even supply chains for the specified product design to deliver a scarce component, define the best response, and reduce the number of consortia working in parallel. For example, one can use stress testing, a method developed by David Simchi-Levi from the MIT Data Science Lab, to identify significant risks in a supply chain. This method helps find small but important component suppliers that may become bottlenecks in the supply chain when demand changes and it improves overall supply chain resilience.
Improving local manufacturing capabilities
While the COVID-19 experience suggests the rationale for running multiple teams in parallel to manage risks of non-delivery, an excessive number of teams working in parallel drains resources, overloads regulatory bodies, and increases recovery costs. As an alternative, the development of local manufacturing capabilities would make a significant difference in improving production resilience in the UK by enabling current supply chains to be reconfigured for human necessities. Moreover, with the advancement in AI, having an adaptable AI model capable of handling the triage at a state of readiness could be a powerful national asset. It can demonstrate the production readiness for potential demand shocks, such as the future pandemic. Policymakers might test it using real industrial intervention, increasing confidence that the population will be safe.
What practical steps should manufacturers take to prepare?
Focus on ‘known unknowns’; identify where you fit in to support emergency production.
Register participation in the local resilience forums (LRFs) and consider extending business strategy with risk and resilience.
Enable regular stress testing of the supply chain, considering potential bottlenecks to production growth.
The IfM is currently working on developing elastic manufacturing systems for highly regulated sectors such as aerospace, automotive, and food. These industries have very strict regulations, which limit production agility. The goal is to support the operation of UK manufacturers under continual demand fluctuations.
If you would like to collaborate with the team regarding pandemic preparedness, please contact Dr. Nikolai Kazantsev — nk622@cam.ac.uk or IfM Engage (ifm-enquiries@eng.cam.ac.uk).
Acknowledgement:The article is devoted to the 4th anniversary of ‘Ventilator Challenge UK’ consortium. The author acknowledges Dick Elsy, CBE, the former Chief Executive Officer of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVM Catapult), for feedback on the paper development, and the kind help and inspiration of Elizabeth Garnsey, Professor Emerita, IfM, University of Cambridge and the community of Clare Hall College. This work was supported by the UKRI Made Smarter Innovation Challenge and the Economic and Social Research Council via InterAct [Grant Reference ES/W007231/1]. Further, the first author acknowledges EPSRC funding, grant reference EP/T024429/1 via ‘Elastic Manufacturing systems – a platform for dynamic, resilient and cost-effective manufacturing services’.
A short video explaining the benefits of, and reasoning behind, the development of the PrOH Modelling methodology
Research overview
PrOH Modelling is a type of soft systems methodology that is used to enquire into and improve complex systemic organizational process problems. As a soft systems methodology PrOH Modelling emphasizes understanding, definition, consensus building and action taking to solve problems. It is particularly useful in processes that are dependent on lots of human activity and decision making, have a high degree of subjectivity and have numerous different stakeholders with diverse backgrounds and opinions. PrOH Modelling is best used in an action research or intervention based context where a researcher is an active participant in organizational strategy and operations and is able to maintain an independent and objective perspective.
The PrOH Modelling approach has been successfully applied in numerous manufacturing contexts including:
Improving leanness and productivity in automotive manufacturing
The challenges of digitalizing an aerospace supply chain
Upscaling supply chains for the manufacture of electric vehicles
The prohmodeller.org website exists for the community of PrOH Modellers. This includes those who wish to use it for academic research projects such as masters dissertation or doctoral theses, those who wish to use it for change projects in their own organizations, or in a consulting capacity in other organizations. We also welcome users to develop the method and share new case study examples with the community.
This research was conducted by Professor Ben Clegg and Dr. Krishna Balthu (Aston University). This work was supported by the UKRI Made Smarter Innovation Challenge and the Economic and Social Research Council via InterAct [Grant Reference ES/W007231/1].
For further discussions or to propose potential applications/collaborations, please contact Ben Clegg.
Recent InterAct research from the Strathclyde University based ‘Future of Work’ team has highlighted the major issue of UK public perception of the manufacturing sector. In the emerging ‘war for talent’, perceptions are essential to providing a snapshot of public opinion about the attraction of the sector and the desirability of working in manufacturing. They may not measure up against ‘reality’, they may be ‘misinformed’, but ultimately they significantly shape the workforce of the future.
In an effort to start changing the narrative around manufacturing, InterAct has partnered with expert creative change consultants GW+Co to deliver an online workshop for manufacturing leaders on 23rd May. The session explored the underlying issues for manufacturing, address the myths of modern branding and introduce ways for you to enact meaningful change within your business.
Attendees had the chance to work with GW+Co’s CEO, Gilmar Wendt, to learn about his innovative approach to tackling the brand and perception challenges of their own organisations, including:
How three manufacturing businesses have changed perceptions by aligning their people with brand, culture, and strategy.
Tools and approaches that deliver successful brands by tapping into the existing skills and knowledge within a business.
Training in a technique developed by GW+Co that helps businesses to identify the pitfalls specific to their business, and documents outcomes in a way that ensure project success and team cohesion.
If you are interested in learning more about the perception challenge facing the manufacturing sector, read our recent reports, which will be joined later this year by further work on practical guidance for rebranding.
You can listen to a summary of some of the key takeaways from the report by Dr. Robert Stewart for ManufacturingTV below
On the 5th June, Innovate UK’s Made Smarter Innovation Showcase took place at Smart Factory Expo.
For the past four years, Made Smarter Innovation Alley at Smart Factory Expo has been a key platform for connecting technology companies with manufacturers, however this year it had a strong focus on celebrating the incredible achievement of organisations the industrial challenge (ISCF) has supported.
The event was an opportunity for the dynamic display of cutting-edge companies and academic organisations. The showcase highlighted success stories where organisations have leveraged the Challenge’s support to become leaders in areas like carbon abatement, resilience, and productivity and people running through the heart of the Showcase.
Smart Factory Expo saw over 13,000 attendees across the 2 days who explored over 200 exhibitions. Made Smarter Innovation hosted over 30 organisations, including InterAct, on their stand.
Made Smarter Innovation supported a number of engaging talks across the Smart Factory Expo theatres:
Made Smarter Innovation Challenge update from Deputy Challenge Director Dr. Ben Farmer (Innovate UK).
InterAct also had the chance to showcase the latest animated videos from the ‘Insights from History’ project, highlighting the important lessons for innovators that can be drawn from past industrial revolutions. You can watch the full series on our YouTube channel.
This research project examines the drivers, barriers, and performance outcomes of adopting industrial digital technologies (IDTs) in UK manufacturing firms. The findings outlined in the report and toolkit provide insights on the interventions that facilitate IDT adoption to enhance the performance of SME manufacturers exporting to international markets.
The project collected primary data from focus groups, interviews and a survey of 303 UK manufacturing SMEs currently exporting products. The outcomes from this primary research were used to develop an IDT adoption toolkit and decision-making model. This toolkit allows UK SME manufacturers to benchmark their level of IDT adoption against the industry standard, to identify which specific IDTs will have the greatest impact on improving their business performance across many indicators, and additionally can direct users to the digital solutions most relevant to their needs, thereby simplifying the process of IDT adoption.
Dr Hanh Pham, Dr Richard Hodgett and Prof Chee Yew Wong (University of Leeds). This work was supported by the UKRI Made Smarter Innovation Challenge and the Economic and Social Research Council via InterAct [Grant Reference ES/W007231/1].
For further discussions or to propose potential applications/collaborations, please contact Hanh Pham.
