MEMBER NEWS
6M€ Grants for Zero Defect and Agile Manufacturing Last year the Chamber highlighted the multimillion ZDMP – Zero Defect Manufacturing Platform project. The Chamber supports both ZDMP and a sister project, EFPF on Agile Manufacturing. Find out how you can participate in bidding for 6M€ (5.4M£) of subcall grant funding to stimulate your business in these fields. These innovation projects run under the EU H2020 program (see inset) and are led by Cheshire SME Information Catalyst (ICE – www.informationcatalyst.com). SCCCI is a proud supporter of the projects – why? Not only are we pleased that one of our members, Information Catalyst, is providing leadership in these fields, we are partnering with them to encourage you, our members, to bid in the open calls to acquire EC funding for experimentation and nurturing innovations. These are tough times for manufacturers and all organizations, yet grant funding can provide between 70-90% of the investment that you needed to make anyway. As a grant you do not need to pay it back and all the work you do can be kept by you! Thus, to keep South Cheshire companies competitive think of the possibilities. The only catch is that Manufacturing SMEs must be in the driving seat either as users or technology organisations.
Find out about the project, H2020, the subcalls and whilst you will see these calls are not open yet, we hope this pre-information can help you prepare and seek further information as necessary. Be sure to register your interests on the relevant project websites which will then allow them to broadcast material directly to you. Whilst we cannot guarantee you win, we hope you can put your best Cheshire foot forward and get success. As a supporter, SCCCI will be publishing further articles close to the calls to remind you of what is on offer.
ZDMP (www.zdmp.eu) is a H2020 project in the field of ‘Factory of the Future’ running from January 2019 until December 2022. It engages 30 partners (Users, Technology Providers, Consultants and Research Institutes) from 11 countries with a total budget of circa 19€. ZDMP aims at providing an extendable Industry 4.0 platform for supporting manufacturers to reach a goal of zero defects both in terms of product and process quality. In this context, ZDMP will allow end-users to connect their systems (eg shopfloor and ERP Systems) to benefit from the features of the platform. The main ZDMP objectives are to ensure/provide: • Quality of the product by advanced modelling, detection, inspection, and predictive techniques • Quality of the process through equipment, resource, and energy efficiency • Runtime platform including marketplace, APIs, and ZDMP Applications for use by developers • Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology including: Data acquisition, interoperability, and analytics supported by orchestration, monitoring and autonomous computing • Demonstration of results in multiple sectors (eg automotive); other sectors added through subcalls.
What might you do in a ZDMP subcall? The open calls will allow SMEs and start-ups to produce, or adapt, technical solutions and conduct pilots using the ZDMP environment; for example: • Software developers can respond to specific manufacturing user demands to design, build, and publish new software components and applications in product and process quality • Zero-defect technology companies can provide the marketplace with drivers and APIs to access their technical equipment and applications • Users companies can validate and use and applications and components in their own environments • Users and Universities can work together on solutions in the field of image processing, energy efficiency, or product inspection.
Horizon 2020 is the biggest European Union Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020) – in addition to the private investment that this money attracts. With 80B€ you can imagine its field is huge, covering everything from ICT, Circular Economy, Health, Energy, Transport, BioScience, and Factories/manufacturing of the future. See https://ec.europa.eu/ programmes/horizon2020/. Its aim has been to be a blueprint for smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth and job creation. It has the political backing of Europe/UKs leaders who agreed that research is an investment in Europe’s future. Horizon 2020 is open to everyone, has high funding grants, and a simple structure that reduces red tape so participants can focus on what is really important. One of the innovations in H2020 is the so-called cascading subcall grants to incorporate SMEs into large projects and is the topic of the main article. What about BREXIT? Under the terms of the famous “Withdrawal Agreement” the UK can continue to participate in EU programmes including H2020. Concretely UK organisations can participate equally in the programme at the same terms as they were before BREXIT. Thus, any activity started such as ZDMP and EFPF will complete naturally and in their cases in December 2022. Interested to find out more and how you can participate – Contact Stuart Campbell, CEO of Information Catalyst and author of this article:-stuart.campbell@informationcatalyst.com
26
BUSINESS NEWS QUARTER 2 2020