Key points
There has recently been a lot written about the Digitalisation of Industry especially around the knotty subject of how we help manufacturing companies to adopt the new technology and extract the full potential benefit from it. A key aspect of this is the access to suitable funding to help companies innovate their products and processes.
In its consultations on industrial strategy, the UK government has indicated that it understands these issues and is looking for ways that industry and government can come together to jointly address these challenges – the so called sector deals.
Brexit will make this a still more challenging situation with significant existing EU funding mechanism, such as Horizon 2020, being thrown into doubt. Back-filling of the levels of funding that UK businesses have historically received through Horizon 2020, will not be a trivial issue for the UK.
The Government Green Paper on Industrial Strategy talks of levels of R&D investment increasing by £2b per year through to 2020/1. It also identifies the Industrial strategy
Challenge Fund as a new source of finance. This is being administered through the government’s innovation funding organisation, Innovate UK.
“The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund was created to provide funding and support to UK businesses and researchers, part of the government’s £4.7 billion increase in research and development over the next 4 years. (1) ”
The focus now has to be on how this money is allocated, accessed, and used. This should become clearer as the Industrial Strategy green paper is transformed into a white paper in the autumn. What we do know is that, in order to streamline the process, the UK’s research councils and Innovate UK are being merged together under a new organisation called UKRI in April 2018(2).
In our own sector, there are three important initiatives with which you should be familiar; the Industrial Digitalisation Review , the Buildings, Industry and Energy Networks Sector Deal bid and the ElecTech council (formerly known as ESCO).
Industrial Digitalisation Review
In its green paper on industrial strategy, the government identified five areas with the potential to become early Sector Deals – areas of focus for government and industry which have the potential to transform the UK’s industrial landscape.
In each area, a prominent industry figure was asked to set up a review to look at the likely impact of the Sector Deal and to propose a partnership with government, based on what industry and government could do together – not just “asks” of government.
One on these, the Industrial Digitalisation Review (IDR) is chaired by Juergen Maier, CEO of Siemens UK and has strong involvement from senior industrialists and trade associations such as GAMBICA. It is tasked with:
Engaging with large and small businesses alongside academics to see how the design, development and deployment of digital technologies can drive increased national productivity (3) .
This report is due to be completed by the end July 2017 in time for the government’s autumn spending review.
The Buildings, Industry and Energy Networks Sector Deal bid
Another potential sector deal, although not one of the five recognised in the first tranche by the government, has been put together by a number of companies and nine trade associations, including GAMBICA in the area of Buildings, Industry and Energy Networks with the following key objectives and attributes:
- Delivering products and services to facilitate key industry societal and Government objectives
- Industry led with Government support
- Achieving greater productivity across the UK
- Meeting UK carbon emission target
- Delivering the digitalisation of products and services
- Increasing exports
This is developing with support from BEIS so that it (a) has quality technical and commercial detail and (b) can be reduced to one slide of bullet points for ministers.
The objective, to understand the overall industrial strategy, review the ElectTech priorities/ (see below) and then make a case to government on how best to approach this based on a blend of industry investment and government support.
The ElecTech (formerly ESCO) Council
ESCO (4) , the Electronic Systems Challenges and Opportunities initiative was formed in 2014. With the aim of enhancing the profile of the twin key “horizontal” enabling technologies, electrical and electronic engineering.
It was in response to the governments seeming fixation on a few vertical industries, Automotive, Aerospace etc., none of which could exist without strong contributions form ESCO’s sectors, whilst the government’s sentiment seems to be that “electronics was not something the UK was good at”.
Now branded more snappily as ElectTech, this group was originally founded by three trade associations (including Gambica) and now boast engagement from many of the major players in the in ElecTech sector and aims to represent the common care-abouts of this disparate and widely dispersed sector.
Its objective are to grow the contribution of the electrical and electronic industries in the UK to GDP by 1.7%, to increase jobs in manufacturing by 150,000 and to develop the UK as a centre for electronic systems – all by the end of the year 2020.
The process automation industry falls nicely within its remit and its main priority in this area is to deliver the benefits of Industry 4.0 (or Industrial Digitalisation, to use the current government parlance) to the UK’s manufacturing and process industries.
It is very clear that the major barrier that it faces in promoting the roll-out of digitalisation technology is a lack of knowledge about what it can offer companies, industry and an associated scepticism about the length of payback periods.
ElecTech has been consistently lobbying for Industry 4.0 demonstrators in the UK for the last three years.
Industry 4.0 Demonstrators for the Process Industries
Demonstrators have been acknowledged as an effective way of increasing awareness of the potential of the digital technology industry. The Germans have used them effectively for several years already and, in 2015, Gambica and ESCO, as it then was, led a government delegation to the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry (the MTC) to promote the concept of UK demonstrators for Industry 4.0
The MTC is part of a network of seven UK High Value Manufacturing Catapult centres around the UK and now boasts the first Industry 4.0 demonstrator.
The MTC has played a key role in the development of Industry 4.0 so far in the UK, by housing the country’s first digital factory demonstrator. It is now vital that we continue to invest in these technologies and skills, and encourage uptake throughout the UK manufacturing sector (5) .
The Process Industry also has a Catapult Centre which is one of the seven mentioned above. This one is in Wilton, Redcar and is called the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI). Fittingly, this is on the base of the old ICI works and still retains much of the services equipment (Power, Water, Steam etc.). It was set-up in 2004 to facilitate innovation in the process industries (6).
Key to its existence, helping companies across the “Valley of Death” between innovation that has just passed the feasibility stage and the stage in its development where it can make some money for the company.
Using the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) terminology originally conceived by NASA in which levels 1-3 roughly represents university research and TRLs 6 – 10 represents the commercialised and mature product, the “Valley of Death” (VoD) is the area between TRLs 4 and 6 in which many companies founder in the Technology Readiness Levels. This is represented in the figure below.
This “Innovation Phase” represents the boost provided by the CPI (and other Catapult Centres) to help companies to clear the VoD. Arguably this remit makes the UK’s Catapult Centres, like the CPI, ideal organisations to host technology demonstrators, where vendor- agnostic demonstrations of new technology, like Industry 4.0, can be attached to life-like or actual processes in order to demonstrate the benefits of the technology in a practical and easily understood way to industrialists, the public and politicians alike.
Gambica’s recent article on Industry 4.0 Applied to the Process Industries (7) attempts to outline the potential benefits of this technology to the process industries and the sort of things that a demonstrator might illustrate.
Conclusion
Government and Industry are working together in several initiatives aimed at making progress in understanding the needs of the UK’s industrial base and turning this into an agreed industrial strategy. The 10 key elements of this strategy are laid out in the Green Paper.
Gambica and its members are actively engaged in several of these initiatives and are working towards showcasing digital technology and the benefits it offers. If you should wish to be involved in identifying products or solutions that can be showcased, do contact us.
We should not miss this opportunity to demonstrate active engagement of industry at a time when government is getting serious about manufacturing industry, arguably for the first time in 30 years.
References
- Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund
- UKRI Chief Executive
- Industrial Digitalisation Review
- ESCO Plan
- www.hvm.catapult.org.uk
- Innovation Phase
- Industry 4.0 Applied to the Process Industries
