AMRC NextGen: The NextGeneration of Digital for Manufacturers

The University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) provides world-class research and innovation to manufacturing companies looking to transform their industrial and economic performance.

AMRC NextGen is a collaborative initiative which aims “to embed low-cost digital technologies in manufacturing companies across South Yorkshire and Wales, whilst also helping to develop our digitally savvy engineers of the future.”

If you want to unlock the power of data for the manufacturing industry, you first need to understand what the companies within it might find useful for business performance, future development and innovation.

AMRC brought Razor in to do just that.

The solution was a two part process. We needed to:

1. Consult with five AMRC NextGen clients to understand their current data systems (e.g. how they’re using it, what they’re collecting) common pain points and the potential opportunities that innovative and creative digital data practices could bring to their organisations. 
2. Design and develop a real-time informatics dashboard to use at conferences and trade shows that centralises data and events across participating companies.

We kicked off the project with a Razor ‘Discovery’ to understand the needs of the NextGen initiative and DataCloud system – their aims, objectives and overview of ‘what success looks like’.

We then conducted 'Razor Rapid Insight'  Workshops for five of the NextGen participants to identify the areas where they see opportunities to understand their business, their operations and their manufacturing systems through data. We worked with them to establish their:

• Key objectives and desires for digital manufacturing
• Digital maturity
• Current software systems
• Key pain points
• Key opportunities

We consolidated all the findings, learnings and conclusions into a single report. Here’s a taster of what we found…

Key objectives:

• A desire to drive innovation and competitiveness via digital technology.
• Collaborate, learn and benchmark against other companies.
• Upskill and educate employees.

Key pain points:

• The ability to understand and utilise data.
• Difficulties in accessing datasets, visualisation and insights.

Key areas for improvement:

• Process monitoring.
• Visualisation and reporting.
• Data pipelines and warehousing to bring all the data together into one place.

Now that the AMRC had a clear overview of their NextGen objectives, we were able to build the dashboards.

The dashboards present data from machines drawing live and average utilisation of factories. The clean design of the dashboard allows the AMRC team to examine the data coming in from several factories across the country in one place. 

Now the dashboards have pride of place on screens inside Factory 2050 to showcase how factories can improve efficiency, save money, and track staff training in an easy to read visual format.

Here’s proof that data can be both informative and visually captivating!