MANUSQUARE Project presented at the FORUM PRODUTECH 2018

Departing from the outlooks of the ManuFUture vision and RTD Strategy for 2030, technical and technological trends and pilot implementations were discussed, paving the way for an informed discussion on key initiatives to cope with the challenges and opportunities of the current industrial transformation process.

Andrea Bettoni, from SUPSI, Switzerland, coordinator of MANUSQUARE, presented the envisioned MANUSQUARE platform and Manufacturing-as-a-Service business model, setting the tone for the community discussion on the platform features, drivers for adoption and the identification of the stakeholders’ likelihood to use it when available.

From the discussions the most valued 3 key features to be implemented in the platform were “production capacity matching” with 62% of the votes, “sustainability assessment”, with 46%, and ex-aequo, with 38% of the votes, “know-how/technology capabilities matching” and “innovation management”, while, surprisingly, “reputation management” was identified as one of the 3 main features to be implemented by only 8% of the participants.

Regarding the top two accelerators to promote the use of the platform the participants identified the “platform maturity”, with 38% of the votes, and “the sectorial relevance of the community”, with 23%. The “benefit and rewards schema” and the “availability of trial versions” were also rated as relevant accelerators to promote the platform usage.

In the most expressive result 40% of the stakeholders identified that would definitely use the platform, while the remaining 60% stated their high and medium likelihood to use the platform when available. These results are quite expressive of the potential and the value that the platform will deliver to the community of stakeholders.

The Forum PRODUTECH 2018 took place in parallel to the 17th edition of the bi-annual EMAF Fair, which is the largest International fair on manufacturing technologies held in Portugal.

PRODUTECH, together with more 11 partners of the R&D system and Industrial companies, form the consortium of MANUSQUARE project,  which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 761145.