News
11 January 2018
Upcoming solutions for resource efficiency in metal-mechanic companies

European manufacturing companies spend around 50% of their budget on raw materials, energy and water, while labour costs are only around 20%. Resource efficiency is therefore a key aspect for the competitiveness of the sector.

 

With this in mind, the EU-funded research project MEMAN is developing a methodology to optimise the use of resources in the whole value chain, rather than in single companies or single processes.

 

The project selected three clusters of the metal-mechanic sector – casting, machining and surface finishing – to validate the innovative methodology, make concrete improvements in their manufacturing processes and develop new business models. The value of the innovations developed in MEMAN has already been successfully proven during the project.

 

Rasmus Egvad, Partner and senior consultant at the exploitation expert Gate2Growth comments “The MEMAN research project produced seventeen exploitable results and three patents, which is a remarkable outcome. What matters though is not only the results, but how they are used. There are two major issues why innovations are currently not being exploited in European projects: the lack of a clear owner of the results, and the lack of a clear plan for commercialisation after the end of the project. In MEMAN, the structure of the consortium has solved these issues. As the project partners are mainly private or semi-private organisations, they have the interest to turn research into viable solutions for the market. And so society as a whole can benefit from the innovations.”

 

MEMAN partners are currently finalising their work to commercialise its solutions for resource efficiency at the end of the project. To do so, they identified which exploitable results are coming out of the project and analysed how they can use them.

 

MEMAN’s results for resource efficiency

 

MEMAN’s 17 exploitable results and 3 patents filed include:

  • Process optimisations for the industrial partners (predictive maintenance, optimisation of business and information processes, advanced material data management);
  • Improved products and machineries, again for the industrial partners (new furnace, new hollow suspension component for car, more efficient core making machine)
  • Improved software for the ICT partners (Common data cloud interface, extension of MES and ERP systems)
  • The use of the MEMAN toolbox and methodology for consultancy services. The toolbox and the methodology can be applied to other sectors than the metal-mechanic one.  

 

Partners are still discussing how the overall exploitation of the MEMAN toolbox and methodology, which are the major results of the project, will be organised. Even with the last details of the business plans to be finalised by the end of the project in June 2018, MEMAN’s innovations already look very promising.

 

For more information, please contact:

Rasmus Egvad (‪re@gate2growth.com)

Valeria Mazzagatti (valeria.mazzagatti@greenovate.eu)