Digital Factory Acceleration project: Digitalisation of production processes

Digitalisation for improving Danish competitiveness

For Denmark to be a leader within the positions of strength, small and medium sized enterprises must be able to contribute to value creation. Here, the ability to digitalise production and production processes can be decisive for whether a small Danish manufacturing company can succeed on the international markets, facing competition on delivery time, price and quality.

There is a huge competitive potential within digitalised production processes and facilities – i.e. processes and facilities that are digital, automated and future-proof with respect to faults, breakdowns, manual work processes and a lack of connection to systems and networks.  

However, the digitalisation potential in the small and medium sized manufacturing companies is often not realised because of the companies’ lack of resources, competences or the ability to implement the digital transformation themselves. 

Therefore, the project ‘Digital Factory Acceleration’ will catalyse the digitalisation of SMEs by helping to exploit the opportunities that new technologies offer within optimisation of manufacturing. Its ultimate goal is to improve the competitiveness of more SMEs on international markets.

‘Digital Factory Acceleration’ aims to accelerate digitalisation in Danish manufacturing companies

The ambition of the project is to accelerate the digital transformation of production facilities in small and medium sized manufacturing enterprises.

Over the course of the project, 18 small and medium sized manufacturing enterprises from all industries and regions will undergo a transformation process. This involves the identification and quantification of digitalisation improvements in the companies’ manufacturing, as well as the implementation of one such improvement during the process. 

To do this, we use the newly developed method ‘Digital Factory Mapping’, which among other things, can help companies:

• identify specific digital improvement opportunities in a given production
• estimate the potential of the improvements as a basis for an early business case
• prioritise the digital improvements.

The method is intended to improve the digital readiness and maturity of the companies in relation to implementing further digitalisation improvements after the end of the project, thus improving the competitiveness of their production and the entire business.

One of the specific key ambitions of the project is that the course should not only kick-start the digitalisation process; it should also equip the companies to initiate additional digitalisation projects using the improvement proposals generated by ‘Digital Factory Mapping’.