Ibermática, I68, SoC-e, IDS and Semantic, which are supported by Gaia and the Basque Government, have created Smart Factory Alliance. This alliance is able to offer global services of Industry 4.0 to manufacturing companies. The objective of this initiative, which combines the experience and knowledge of the five companies, is to be able to tackle complex projects by offering innovative solutions.
The Smart Factory Alliance is an initiative promoted by the ICT’s Basque Cluster, Gaia. According to its Manager, Mr. Tomás Iriondo, the aim of this alliance between competitors “is to offer a larger number of capacities in Industry 4.0 with a strong view of intersectoral collaboration”. “Each company is expert in diverse aspects, but the alliance leverages the solutions of each one promoting new models of collaboration”, he has claimed.
In the presentation of the Smart Factory Alliance, which has taken placed in the Chamber of Commerce of Gipuzkoa , Mr. Iriondo has underlined that the projects that will be addressed will be only of the field of Industry 4.0, “ERPs oriented to project management, modeling of productive processes, planning capabilities, sensors, cyber-security, automation and implementation of advanced analytics by Big Data, and so on”.
The role each company has in the alliance is complementary, each of them providing capabilities, products and experience for the benefit of the final costumer. Mr. Iriondo explained that the projects will be addressed in a coordinate way “in order to offer the best possible product and service”. To facilitate this process it has been created a capacity map, which contains the specific solutions offered by each partner.
He has also highlighted that the members of the Smart Factory Alliance will do a common market research, in order to identify projects of an appropriate magnitude and complexity, in which the coordinate approach proposed by the Alliance will mean a value element for its implementation. “And in the spotlight there will be big companies that will be offered the whole map of global solutions, with one of the widest portfolios that exists in Industry 4.0”, he has emphasized.
Industry 4.0 means the progressive appearance of intelligent and connected products and means of production which will lead to the incursion of new business models, to changes in the ways customers and suppliers relate, and to the continuous transformation of the products into advanced services. “It is still far form knowing the limits that this can lead to, but we now for sure that the sum of forces will allow us to play an important role in the industry’s transformation and to be in a privileged position in the market”, Gaia’s managing director has concluded.
The Smart Factory Alliance is the result of more than a year work between the five companies, in which it has been defined the collaboration basis and the way to provide value to the market, with a joint proposal for the application of Industry 4.0 methodologies.