Helping manufacturing SMEs harness data and digitalisation

• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

"This is a massive, massive win for us," says Peter Devine, head of strategic partnerships at the Ulster University faculty of computing, engineering and the built environment. "We are thrilled and delighted. It doesn't happen very often that a Northern Ireland institution manages to win a competitive bid to lead a UK programme like this."

Made Smarter Innovation is a UK initiative to increase the productivity of manufacturing companies across the UK, he explains. "It has overall funding of £185 million," he says. "Innovation UK was tasked with delivering change with that budget. A number of programmes including a digital supply chain hub and some awareness-raising initiatives have been delivered over the past few years. The SMDH is the biggest of them."

Innovation UK put out an open call for proposals for the programme, and Ulster University formed a consortium of 11 partners to bid for it. "We put a strong emphasis on getting a good geographic spread and we have partners in Wales, Scotland, and England."

Reach out

The main goal is to reach out to SMEs and smaller manufacturing companies around the UK who may feel neglected by government programmes because of geography or their technology level. "These companies are not engaging with or getting support from government initiatives," Devine adds.

"The government puts hundreds of millions of pound into things like advanced manufacturing hubs in the middle of England. This is great for the big companies but if you are bashing metal in Antrim or making washers in Inverness it isn't that relevant. The idea of SMDH is to create a community of SMEs across the UK and give them a platform to share their manufacturing data.

"We provide the data analytics and manufacturing expertise. We analyse the data from the companies and give them recommendations, ideas and support to help them move up the digitalisation ladder."

Those recommendations can be in areas like automation, robotics, energy-saving initiatives and so on. "There is an acknowledgment that large companies have in-house capability in these areas but SMEs do not. That's where SMDH comes in."

Another aspect is the programme is the creation of virtual test beds. "If a manufacturing company is thinking about introducing robotics to the production line it's very risky to go out and buy something and hope that it...