Manufacturing Made Smarter is an initiative of upgrade of production in Great Britain

2020

The government of Britain invests £147 million in upgrade of production to the Industry 4.0

At the end of September, 2020 it was announced that the government of Britain intends to invest £147 million in the second round of "Manufacturing Made Smarter", the scheme directed to promotion of innovations and "podklyuchennost" in the production environment to the country. This initiative, Innovate UK fund, allows the companies registered in Great Britain to submit applications for the financing directed to implementation of digital technologies for conversion of the British production chains.

After application of the company will take part in the project which should help production lines to become more effective, flexible, productive and fault-tolerant due to use of industrial digital technologies (IDT) - the technology achievements which are specially developed for improvement of specific industry.

It is reported that these investments should increase performance by 30%, will help to accelerate the movement to zero emissions and will help to create thousands of new jobs to continue revolution in the industry.

A competition is held at the same time in two directions: feasibility statement and industrial researches. Candidates will select one of these two directions on which they will be concentrated.

Through Innovate UK the State agency on researches and innovations of Great Britain (UKRI), responsible for such schemes, already selected financing for the amount of £20 million (€21.6 million) for 14 different projects at the first stage of an initiative. In total 34 projects for the total amount about £100 million of pounds sterling were submitted to the first round

The previous winner projects became:

• Conversion of production of bicycle frames by the British SME Frog Bikes using digital and production technologies for creation of lighter and more productive bicycle made using the processed materials for cost optimization and exponential reduction of time of production.

• The supplier of Raynor Foods sandwiches provided national cloud network open source under the name "Digital Sandwich" that the companies producing food and drinks could exchange data and cooperate in this network.

• The data integration in real time with multisector applicability created by GKN Aerospace, the engineering group heading a cross-industry command which includes the companies from space, automobile and [pharmaceutics|pharmaceutical]] the industries, for testing of a combination of digital technologies, including intelligent robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

These projects include different concepts of IDT and the Industry 4.0 as 3D - printing, industrial Internet of Things and digital doubles. They cover four different directions: the smart connected factories, the connected supply chains, flexible production capabilities and design developments.

The Innovate UK fund hopes that these projects will successfully use possibilities of the leading British companies interacting both with small and with large developers of technologies, the startups and affiliated enterprises which are integrated with the lead world research agencies for the creation interconnected, the innovation and the reformed manufacturing sector.

Digital technologies are capable to change how we make and we deliver products and services today and in the future, and I am glad that we managed to protect financing of this vital program Our purpose - to help Great Britain to become the leader in manufacturing industry and to develop technological solutions of the next generation which will define how this world is arranged. The current problems with COVID-19 which all industries face only emphasize the vital value of production in Great Britain in all sectors. There are huge opportunities for innovations in this area, we have world's leading industries, powerful scientific and research community, the dynamic technology sector, and I am glad to see how this powerful coalition transforms the future of production

we have huge production capabilities in Great Britain, and recent events confirmed importance of strengthening of this sector for stabilization of the country and economic growth. Fast development of digital revolutionary production technologies gives us the fine chance to create this result. Using the potential of this technology, we will be able seriously to increase performance, stability and global competitiveness and also to create products and services which will allow to open the modern digital enterprises. This program is a key step forward as it will help the British production companies jointly to solve this problem and to develop economic digital solutions for deployment in a manufacturing sector

In the second round the small and medium enterprises can submit applications for attraction of investiya, compensating thereby up to 70% of expenses.

The cost of projects can vary from £250 thousand to £3 million.