How to support digitalization projects in a fast moving transition for the manufacturing sector?

Going digital and running a digitalization project has become the number one priority on the agenda for many enterprises in all sizes and various sectors of the economy. Digitalization and automation are transforming manufacturing in several ways through intelligent products communication (IoT), digital supply chain, automation based on robotics and computer-aided manufacturing and automation of internal processes.
However, researches show that so far, mostly large enterprises have managed to empower their digitalization projects, supported by extensive investments into IT infrastructure and human capacity. Considering that for larger enterprises enabling the SMART factory could be a matter of planning and managing their available IT budgets, for the small and medium-sized business, keeping up with the new digital market trends is a challenge in terms of available financial and human resources.
Looking at the European level statistics, only 5% of SME enterprises have started their digitalization projects. If we look into details of the Norwegian manufacturing industry, we won’t see much better results. Moreover, the industry has been literally struggling for the past five years, not being able to generate profit and to grow.

Advancing manufacturing with an affordable application that interconnects business-level software with operational data from the field.

IDN and its partners aim at developing an Industry 4.0 solution that is affordable, accessible and relatively easy to integrate and tailored to the business needs of the customers, this will enable manufacturing SMEs to become factories of the future.
The main objective of Industry4SME is to offer an affordable pay-as-you-go Industry 4.0 solution in the cloud (Microsoft Azure), tailored to the production processes of small to medium enterprises. The platform will drive the digital transformation of the production in the direction of smart maintenance, digital supply chain, and new data-driven business models.
Following the key Industry 4.0 design principles, Industry4SME aims to interconnect business-level software systems (such as ERP, PLM, CRM) with operational data from the field, thus allowing observed manufacturing operations to be compared against planned. In a contribution to the third Industry 4.0 pillar, the system will support human operators in their day-to-day decision-making tasks.

IDN is the project leader and owner of the tools developed within the Industry4SME-project. The project is part of the IDN long term strategy to provide manufacturing enterprises with both methods and tools that enables them to optimize their business processes and production.