The future of the machining industry will be digital. A Factory 4.0 has a transparent shop floor and connected machines, as well as other advantages. What exactly does digitisation mean for you as a machining company? And how does it provide solutions for the challenges you are facing today?

Industry 4.0 is built around the exchange of information between machines and higher-level systems. Connected machines and far-reaching digitisation ensure that manufacturing companies can make their production lines more flexible, secure and autonomous. For machine builders, connected machines offer the potential to develop digitally supported services.

The answer is 'of couse, we can'! But 'why?' and 'what are the ways to do it?' are the actual questions that need to be answered.

Every manufacturing process starts with collecting the right components for the job. Vanas Engineering has joined our 4.0 Made Real by Sirris initiative as technology partner. Its expertise and smart storage solutions will be at the start of our watch production guaranteeing each client gets his or her personalised watch.

Industry 4.0 is the future, that much is clear. However, what this means in practice, is not so clear. Over the past months Sirris has been building its 4.0 Made Real Pilot Factory to materialise the 'Industry 4.0' concept using nine digital building blocks. The time has finally come. We will reveal our 4.0 Made Real infrastructure on 7 November.

Carrying out inspections on business-critical objects and production installations can prevent loss of quality and production stoppages. It is preferable that these inspections are carried out on a regular basis and in the same manner. Cobots can offer suitable solutions in several cases.

RenewAire is an American company that specialises in energy recovery ventilation units for the residential and commercial property markets. The units are available in more than 20,000 ready-to-use product configurations. A stone’s throw from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the QRM philosophy was developed by Professor Rajan Suri, RenewAire was one of the first companies to have adopted it.

In order to make the opportunities presented by Factory 4.0 more tangible, Sirris and two French partners, CITC and Cetim, have each built a demonstrator that is available for companies.

Office processing and administration activities have a huge impact on your customer response times as well as your operations cost and quality. Learn how to reduce these response times and increase customer satisfaction while lowering your costs and improving your quality.

Machines and equipment can be connected in several ways, each offering a dataset that differs in level of detail and information. Depending on your needs, time and budget you can select the most suited connection method. Within our 4.0 manufacturing system different methods will be demonstrated.

An important aspect of the demonstrator in the Smart & Digital Factory Application Lab in Kortrijk is data integration. Connecting the different elements of production systems is one of the six skills of a smart, agile factory.

In our factory with 4.0 technology, we aim to 3D print a watch. We use a femtosecond laser to create an optical effect, and we couldn’t be more impressed!

The latest issue of the Interreg Factory 4.0 Project newsletter keeps you up-to-date with progress, events and testimonies.

Freeform lenses or mirrors, produced by means of 3D printing or 3D printed moulds, make it possible to create innovative lighting solutions with customised radiation patterns. To introduce companies to the design methodology and possibilities of such optical components, we are organising the workshop ‘Freeform Optics’ on 12 September in cooperation with KU Leuven.

In its workshop in Diepenbeek Sirris is creating a new demonstrator, on which it will have to be possible to create smooth (3D) surfaces. Mechanical components with rough surfaces are preferably to be avoided. You will have to perform some time-consuming and expensive tricks to smoothen the surface. Our new demonstrator will enable us to produce components with smooth surfaces.