The UK’s Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Greg Clark has opened the country’s first R&D test bed facility dedicated to helping UK manufacturing develop digital solutions to drive innovation and productivity in their companies.

Greg Clark visited the Factory 2050 in Sheffield to see how a powerful private sector consortium led by Rolls-Royce and Accenture – and drawn from the aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical industries – has collaborated with the University of Sheffield AMRC to develop a connected facility that will de-risk investment in the digital technologies at the heart of the UK government’s Industrial Strategy and Made Smarter initiative.

Mr Clark, and the Minister for Business and Industry, Andrew Stephenson, were given a tour of the connected smart factory test bed which included real-time data streams from remote machining activities, smart assembly using intelligent workbenches and augmented reality, visual inspection linked to artificial intelligence and a reconfigurable factory cell.

The test bed aims to show the significant opportunities of applying digital technologies to manufacturing with 50% productivity benefit, 30% reduction in defects and 50% improved time to market increasingly being demonstrated.

Secretary of State, Greg Clark, said: “From its two leading universities to the new Boeing factory, Sheffield has a bright future as a leader internationally for advanced manufacturing, innovation and R&D.”

“The facilities at this first Smart Factory Test Bed will be a real asset to the city and the UK. Working with some of the UK strongest sectors – aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical to provide insights into the future of digitally-connected manufacturing and showcasing how industry can use these technologies to transform productivity and performance.”

“This is our modern Industrial Strategy in action, with Made Smarter working directly with businesses on the ground to provide advice and support. Through Made Smarter and the Made Smarter Commission we’re working with leading figures from industry and academia to boost productivity and create thousands of new highly skilled jobs.”

The founder and Executive Dean of the AMRC, Professor Keith Ridgway, said: “This open-access test bed shows the power of digital, the power of collaboration, and the power of the North to drive the new economy. Working closely with one of the UK’s most innovative companies, Rolls-Royce, and with the innovation leaders at Accenture, the AMRC has created a facility where manufacturing companies, from global brands like Airbus to family firms like Footprint Tools, can come to de-risk the development of digital solutions that will drive innovation across their businesses.”

The University of Sheffield AMRC, which is part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, has laid the foundations for using connected, real-time data to track the manufacturing lifecycle of components, from machining and inspection through to assembly using digital work instructions displayed through augmented reality.

The Director of Global Manufacturing at Rolls-Royce Dr Hamid Mughal said: “We’re proud to have played the lead industrial role in creating this unique capability. Today, there are many challenges in implementing digital in manufacturing at an industrial scale and pace with only a few real examples of ‘true’ Smart Factories providing seamless integration from the ‘Top floor to the Shop floor.’ The high total cost of implementation, lack of interoperability, high number of legacy assets plus concerns around cyber are major barriers to exploitation. We want to commoditize this technology and ultimately want this landscape to become both predictable and ‘economical’ for the OEMs and their supply chains. This testbed will provide an open, agnostic platform to explore, challenge, mature, exploit and ultimately accelerate transformational technologies in the wider UK manufacturing base.”