West Region
Spain, France and Portugal

Companies involved: Ford (Corporate) & Azitek (Startup)

Challenge description: The challenge seeks to improve the visibility and control of Ford’s assets within their manufacturing plants, including tools, equipment and inventory. The company faces several logistical and operational challenges when tracking the location, condition and movement of these assets, which can impact the production efficiency and output.

Ford is looking for innovative technologies and solutions that can improve the accuracy and efficiency of asset tracking, reducing costs, and providing real-time insights into the manufacturing operations. Some of the specific areas of interest include the use of advanced sensors and data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and automation solutions.

Solution: Azitek IoT provides real-time asset visibility to power logistics digitalization.

Innovation: The Asset Management IoT system enables companies to gain visibility and better manage their assets. By attaching low-cost active tags to every asset, organisations can track the inventory status, location and oversee circular supply chains in real-time.

Tag reduced size of 42x25x7mm – Tag battery lifetime of 6 years with an update rate of 1 minute – Anchors with outstanding reading range up to 400m – Anchor reads up to 300 tags/second and is Wi-Fi compatible.

Companies involved: Voestalpine (Corporate) & ChainTraced (Startup)

Challenge description:  For Voestalpine it is a particular challenge to assess upstream emissions and to correctly allocate those to specific produced goods. The challenge is focused on the upstream part and the main tasks are:

> Visualise and calculate the (total) carbon contribution from raw material suppliers;

> Include secondary/alternative raw materials and necessary recycling rel. aspects of the supplied materials;

> Investigate (quality, completeness, timeliness, …) and include all available and necessary data sources. All tasks should be in line with the existing IT infrastructure, processes and interfaces of Voestalpine High Performance Metals, producer of high alloyed materials.

Solution: ChainTraced is a leading provider of digital end-to-end traceability solutions focused on tracing raw material to end product across the metallic value chain.

Innovation: ChainTraced digital traceability platform enables a digital representation of product through out the full value chain. Provide digital product certificates to customers, accessible securely 24/7

Companies involved: Eroski (Corporate) & Prenomics (Startup)

Challenge description:  Eroski aims at analysing and optimising the shelf life of each provider’s goods with an AI-driven model in order to improve economic and logistics efficiency as well as minimise product waste due to inaccurate shelf life calculations.

Eroski is looking for a technology provider that could create an AI-driven model to optimise each product’s shelf life, considering the product’s unique characteristics as well as the rotation levels. This would allow Eroski to better adjust the conditions with providers to make logistics more rationalised, improving the advantages to these providers. In addition, such a solution would reduce the volume of discarded products (food thrown out) while improving shelf life and the productivity of logistic flows.

Solution: Prenomics accompanies companies in the transformation process towards a Data Driven organisation, applying artificial intelligence techniques, big data and implementing data processing technologies.

Innovation: We work on challenges combining business mindset, data science expertise and technology knowledge. This multidisciplinary approach allows us to talk directly with non-technical business people, understand the real needs of the company and proactively build powerful and scalable data solutions.

Companies involved: Kuka (Corporate) & roboception (Startup)

Challenge description:  A key enabler for distributed manufacturing networks is being able to assess the quality of incoming and outgoing goods. Especially for small and medium sized enterprises with small lot sizes and flexible production schedules, assessing the quality of parts is difficult.

With Trustscan, we want to establish an automated part verification methodology, which requires zero manual effort and enable companies to verify the quality of goods from lot size 1 to 1000. The smart combination of affordable and safe robot systems, 3D and 2D vision systems and task-based path planning algorithms shall enable everybody to gain confidence in the quality of parts they receive and produce. Initial invest shall be reduced by transferring required computationally demanding algorithms to shared infrastructures in the cloud.

Solution: Roboception Optimising industrial processes through Digital Twins and Machine Learning models. Reduce energy consumption and improve output KPIs in days instead of months.

Innovation: The Digital Twin is an accurate simulation of the physical and chemical properties of an industrial process. It can be built through a simple Drag&Drop interface without requiring coding skills. The platform allows industrial optimization problems to be modeled as Markov Decision Process (MDP) which can be solved using deep Reinforcement Learning.

Companies involved: Danobatgroup (Corporate) & Neuron Soundware (Startup)

Challenge description:  Danobat, member of Mondragon Group, is a manufacturer of machine solutions for grinding, turning, punching and bending. The challenge seeks to model, analyze, and process data extracted from Danobat’s machines and production systems in real-time. The company is looking for innovative solutions that can provide reliable and accurate data analysis and modeling for quality assessment, including identifying defects, reducing scrap, and optimizsng the use of resources.

Some of the specific areas of interest include the use of advanced sensors, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and solutions that can provide real-time feedback to operators and managers.

Solution: Neuron Soundware By using Artificial Intelligence in combination with sound analysis and the analysis of other physical parameters in operating machines, NSW ensures the peak performance of the machinery, thus optimizing productivity and reducing operating costs.

Innovation: NSW analyses various physical parameters of machinery, such as sound, temperature, pressure, electric current, magnetic moment, luminescence, permeability and irradiance, amongst others, to provide information about the current health and behaviour of individual machines.

Companies involved: Faiveley (Corporate) & Komete (Startup) 

Challenge:  Startup Komete needed a way to access the corporate market

Solution: We introduced them to Faiveley at a networking event in Italy

> Both companies pursued their relationship and agreed on a Proof of Concept for Komete’s plug-and-play IoT solution

> In 2024 Komete’s technology was deployed in all Faiveley factories

Impact:

> Significantly reduced production time

> Complete traceability of the production flow for each product

> Reduced time spent by operators updating order status so they can focus on value-added activities

Companies involved: VW (Corporate) & Maverick (Startup)

Challenge:  Irish startup Mavarick was looking for ways to access new markets and grow their business. They won our EIT BoostUp! Europe competitions and wanted our help to make the right connections.

Solution: We introduced Mavarick to Volkswagen who we were helping source a solution to a challenge they had around industrial fleet automation through AI.

Impact:  With our support, Mavarick was selected by Volkswagen and experienced great results:​

> A growth journey within one year from one country into another country as well as into another sector.​

> Generating business with a global corporate company with the opportunity to generate an international roll-out of their product in the future.

Companies involved: smartFAB (Startup)

Challenge:  smartFAB is a highly promising startup supported by us since 2022. They needed support to identify use cases to validate their solution, find commercial partners and expand internationally.

Solution: Participation to the Accelerator Forward Factory and various Access2Market initiatives.

Attended Matchmaking event in Milan, securing 27 appointments with EIT Manufacturing partners who they met again at our Access2Tech event, developing the idea of becoming Business owner in the EIT Manufacturing call for proposals.

Impact:  With our support, and funding of ca. EUR 600 000, SmartFAB achieved a lot in a short time that resulted in an ​Innovation project with four relevant end users: WHIRPOOL, DANA, GOODYEAR, BIC.