Right from day-one of the SMART-PDM consortium formation, the paradigm of international business cooperation has been about each participating country being represented by a minimum of one industrial end-user partner. Hence now, for most countries we have more than one industrial partner (i.e. end user) involved. This is because the topic of predictive maintenance is strongly coupled with industry, and therefore a full-on industrial buy-in is a must. Across 5 countries we have 10 industrial demonstrators who are already excited about the future outcomes of this project, including Kocaer Rolling Mill, Isuzu, Zorlu Enerji, Junkkari, Zayer Milling Machines, Danobat, Caverion, Mondragon Assembly and Sonae. The industrial demonstrators are strongly aligned with the expectation of getting first-hand up-to-date know-how (in the domain of predictive maintenance, which is part of Industry 4.0) as well as forming new partnerships that will help them sail through the Industry 4.0 wave more professionally and stably.
Project Leader: Enforma
| Country | Technology and knowledge Provider | Integration and Tools Provider | Industrial Demonstrator |
| TUR | Enforma (S), Netaş (L), Bitnet (S) | Netaş (L), Bitnet (S) | Kocaer Rolling Mill (L), Anadolu Isuzu (L), Zorlu Enerji (L) |
| FIN | VTT (R) | Wapice (L), Ramentor (S), Nome (S) | Junkkari (S), Caverion (L) |
| ESP | Tecnalia (R), Ideko (R), Lortek (R), | Savvy (S), CTI Soft (S) | Zayer Milling Machines (L), Danobat (L), Mondragon Assembly (L) |
| ROU | BEIA (S) | SIS (S) | CIMR Laboratory in UPB via SIS |
| PRT | ISEP (R) | Virtual Power Solutions (S) | Sonae (L) |
S: SME; L: Large; R: Research
There are integration and tools providers in each country, regardless of whether they are listed in the partner list or not. While 9 of them, namely Netaş, Bitnet, Ramentor, Nome, Wapice, CTI Soft, Savvy, SIS and Virtual Power Solutions provide tools and integration input to the project, this is not to say that Zorlu Enerji, Isuzu, Kocaer or Sonae do not address the need for contribution at that level – on the contrary, the consortium is aware that these companies have already addressed integration / tools needs internally or have already outsourced them. While the integration services providers will benefit from handling new generation sensor networks and carrying out their integration with the legacy system, the tools providers can all benefit from fine-tuning and improving their physical tool-sets and software tools.
The consortium has 9 technology and knowledge providers which cover all aspects of the consortiums technological targets with particular focus on their respective national sub-consortium. While some of the technology / knowledge providers will see the benefit from the project by generating research results of highest degree of accuracy (due to involvement of end-users), others will see the project’s advantages through extending their products and services portfolio, increased saleability of their products and services, increased international collaboration and market penetration.
Cross-border cooperation is promoted within the technology / knowledge providers via the exchange of know-how and information regarding technological direction. At the industrial level, cross-border cooperation is expected to be less yet existent and this is merely due to the fact that end-users are more sensitive to sharing of trade secrets or intellectual property and that we have end-users from a variety of industries which means that one’s results may mean a lot for its corresponding industry as a whole but may mean little for the industrial partner in the consortium.
Dissected at another angle, the consortium consists of 12 SMEs, 9 Large Enterprises and 4 RTOs which altogether present a balanced and valuable composition.
Last but not the least, the consortium believes that the ITEA framework presents a very good opportunity for “technology and knowledge providers”, “integration and tools providers”, and “industrial demonstrators” to come together under the heavy burden of responsibility of producing industry-driven pragmatic results based on software solutions.