Accelerating Smart Factory solutions in Defence

Defence manufacturers are scaling up to meet today’s global security challenges. Accelerated deployment of Industry 4.0 solutions can make a big contribution, if done in the right way. 

Many of our defence customers are ramping up production to meet the needs of UK armed forces and our international partners. The increase in activity will be with us for some time, it’s not a short-term thing. We see significant investment in new production lines and infrastructure. We also see that often, investment in additional capacity is not enough. Manufacturing must make a step change in overall effectiveness. Production losses must be driven down.

Smart factory solutions – or I4.0 – can make a massive contribution to systematically reducing production losses. If done in the right way and scaled-up effectively. 

Smart factory is not new. Many defence organisations have run pilot projects, but few have successfully taken advantage of harnessing industrial data at scale. At Project One, we are helping customers to do this, overcoming the barriers to “smart factories at scale”: 

• Finding the value: being focussed on the use cases that will have maximum impact on reducing production losses. 
• Security and networks: connecting OT and IT networks while preserving information security. 
• Equipment variety: making sense of the wide variety of production equipment to determine which connections are valuable and putting in place robust and repeatable connectivity. 
• Choosing right vendors: there are many options in the market. We help customers to make the right choices. 
• Building internal capability: this is super important.  

We are helping customers to design and scale-up solutions in some of the most challenging defence manufacturing environments. If you’d like to know more, please contact theteam@projectone.com