Envisioning an Advanced ICT-supported Build-up of Manufacturing

Skills for the Factories of the Future

Joao Costa

, Dimitris Kiritsis

1,2

, Poul Kyvsgaard Hansen

, Manuel Oliveira

, Loukas Rentzos

Hadrien Szigeti

and Marco Taisch

HighSkillz, Kent, U.K.

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Allaborg University, Allaborg, Denmark

SINTEF, Trondheim Norway

University of Patras, Rio Patras, Greece

Dassaul Systèmes, Vélizy-Villacoublay Cedex, France

Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

Keywords: Manufacturing Skills, ICT for Manufacturing, Factories of the Future.

Abstract: In this paper, we present the main concepts and the aim of the ManuSkills FoF project which is to study the

use of enhanced ICT-based technologies and training methodologies to facilitate an increase of young talent

interest in manufacturing and to support their training of new manufacturing skills. The project will

experiment with a wide range of innovative delivery mechanisms such as serious games and teaching

factory, supported by the use of social media augmented by gamification and leveraging the distribution

channels preferred by young talent. In addition, the project will explore the pedagogical frameworks best

suited to the personalization of individual learning needs taking into account the industrial demand.

ManuSkills will address all three stages of the young talent pipeline (i.e. children, teenagers, young people),

where in the early stages the focus will be to make manufacturing education more attractive to young talent,

whilst in the later stages the focus will be to facilitate transformative deep learning of individuals, with

reduced time-to-competence.

1 INTRODUCTION

When asking young talents, their understanding of

what manufacturing of the future entails could not

be further from the truth. In fact, with the shrinking

of distances to create the global village coupled with

the ever faster pace of advances in technology and

process innovation, one can state clearly that

manufacturing is in a state of constant innovation.

The factory of the industrial revolution, where the

shopfloor was unsafe and dirty, is being replaced by

factories where lean and TQM have dramatically

changed the work environment. A fundamental

switch has taken place, where in the beginning the

workers carried out repetitious tasks, now the focus

is on cognitive interaction with the work

environment through ICT. Consequently, higher

education has become necessary. In addition to

engineering, other competences such as sense

making, dealing with complexity and soft skills, are

also necessary.

Manufacturing goes digital and this is argued to

amount to a third industrial revolution

(Economist,

2012). Over the past few decades, manufacturing has

evolved from a more labour-intensive set of

mechanical processes (traditional manufacturing) to

a sophisticated set of information-technology-based

processes (advanced manufacturing). The dirty,

noisy, unsafe workshops have given place to modern

technologies and cleaner work environments.

Everything in the factories of the future will be run

by smarter software. Digitisation in manufacturing

will have a disruptive effect every bit as big as in

other industries that have gone digital, such as office

equipment, telecoms, photography, music,

publishing and films. And the effects will not be

confined to large manufacturers; indeed, they will

need to watch out because much of what is coming

389

Costa J., Kiritsis D., Kyvsgaard Hansen P., Oliveira M., Rentzos L., Szigeti H. and Taisch M..

Envisioning an Advanced ICT-supported Build-up of Manufacturing Skills for the Factories of the Future.

DOI: 10.5220/0004928503890393

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 389-393

ISBN: 978-989-758-021-5

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

will empower small and medium-sized firms and

individual entrepreneurs. Launching novel products

will become easier and cheaper. Communities

offering 3D printing and other production services

that are a bit like Facebook are already forming

online—a new phenomenon which might be called

social manufacturing. Things will be made

economically in much smaller numbers, more

flexibly and with a much lower input of labour,

thanks to new materials, completely new processes

such as 3D printing, easy-to-use robots and new

collaborative manufacturing services available

online. The wheel is almost coming full circle,

turning away from mass manufacturing and towards

much more personalised production. According to

the ActionPlanT project vision (ActionPlanT) for

future manufacturing – ‘Manufacturing 2.0’, future

ICT-enabled manufacturing will be:

1. On-demand: To sustain market share and

create employment opportunities,

Manufacturing 2.0 should accommodate

changing demands from a new customer base

and deliver customised products on-demand.

2. Optimal: European enterprises need to be able

to produce products with superior quality, high

security and durability and, at the same time,

competitively priced compared to products

from emerging markets.

3. Innovative: Faster introduction of collective

innovation is one of the three key growth

factors together with human capital and

infrastructures. Innovative thinking, design and

manufacturing will lead the way to

sovereignty, independence and growth of

European manufacturing.

4. Green: Manufacturing is responsible for

significant energy use and consumption of

natural resources. Manufacturing 2.0 needs

focused initiatives to reduce energy footprints

on shop floors and increase awareness of end-

of-life (EoL) product use.

5. Human-centric: Manufacturing 2.0 will

evolve from being perceived as production

centred to human centred with greater

emphasis on generating core value for human

stakeholders. Future plants should be more

accommodating towards the needs of the

European workforce and consider them an

integral stakeholder.

Moreover, since the manufacturing process, in a

broad sense, becomes more and more complex, a big

number of complementary roles will be necessary

within the Factories of the Future, such as:

 Virtual enterprise: Supply chain engineers;

 Forecasting: Business analyst and data

scientists;

 Multi technology product: Industrial

engineers;

 Quality: Quality managers;

 More complex manufacturing technologies:

Process engineers and planners;

 Energy: Energy managers.

In spite of the constant innovation pushing

manufacturing forward, the lack of awareness by

mainstream society implies that young talent does

not choose a career in manufacturing contributing to

a serious shortage of skilled labour. Reaching out to

the young talent is the focus of the ManuSkills

European project, studying the effectiveness of

innovative delivery mechanisms such as serious

games and teaching factory, supported by the use of

social media augmented by gamification.

The paper is organised as follows: in section 2

the main concepts and project objectives are

presented. In section 3 we present the approach we

will follow to develop the concepts, implement them

in an appropriate platform. In section 4 we present

the expected impact to be created by the project

actions, achievements and results.

2 CONCEPTS AND PROJECT

OBJECTIVES

ManuSkills aims to study how best to reach the

young talent using an ICT framework to address all

three stages of the young talent pipeline (i.e.

children, teenagers, young people), where in the

early stages the focus will be to raise awareness

about manufacturing to concerned stakeholders, then

to make manufacturing education more attractive to

young talent, whilst in the later stages the focus will

be to facilitate transformative deep learning of

individuals, with reduced time-to-competence. The

resulting ManuSkills ICT framework is captured in

Figure 1 where the triangle of parents, youth and

teachers access the framework over their preferred

device.

The learning content on the platform is packaged

as learning objects provided by both educational

institutions and industry, which are delivered using a

wide range of mechanisms, such as teaching factory,

serious games, webinar, video player and mobile

apps. ManuSkills will benefit from existing

pedagogical material from within the consortium

and study the effectiveness along with the impact on

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Figure 1: ManuSkills ICT Framework.

both raising the awareness and learning amongst

young talent. In fulfilling its aims, ManuSkills will

address the following objectives:

 Objective 1: Study the barriers and enablers

towards raising the awareness of manufacturing

and training along the entire young talent

pipeline;

 Objective 2: Explore how to successfully

engage young talent with ICT and increase their

interest in manufacturing thus addressing the

talent shortage for Europe to sustain its global

competitiveness;

 Objective 3: Study innovative delivery

education mechanisms and training

methodologies to facilitate more effective and

efficient competence development towards the

rapid build-up of existing and emerging

manufacturing skills;

 Objective 4: Mobilise stakeholders from

business, government, academia, international

organizations, civil society and

nongovernmental organizations to develop

action plans and influence policy for improving

manufacturing education;

 Objective 5: Focus on strengthening

manufacturing education at higher education

levels and STEM related subjects with focus on

engineering in secondary education, addressing

the three target stakeholder groups: children,

parents and educators.

 Objective 6: Achieve early impact based on the

ManuSkills proof-of-concept platform and other

project results, and facilitate wider impact

through aggressive dissemination and

networking activities supported by a

sustainable exploitation case.

3 APPROACH

A framework capable of capturing the existing and

future manufacturing skills, could be the basis of a,

currently lacking, reference to professional needs,

related to advanced manufacturing. These skills are

essential to manufacturing companies in order to

improve their innovativeness and competitiveness.

Skilled young talent will strengthen the capacity to

innovate and will give new incentive to industry in

order to hinder the outflow of manufacturing

activities to countries outside Europe. The synthesis

of such a reference framework of manufacturing

skills will be updateable in order to allow for new

skills to be added that may result from new

developments in advanced manufacturing. This

framework will be used as a reference for

manufacturing education and will enable capturing

the main manufacturing skills, required by European

companies for the promotion of innovation and

creativity. The development of this reference

framework will be based on a taxonomy of

manufacturing skills with reference to existing

relevant studies. This taxonomy will identify the

main classes of manufacturing skills needed to

compete in the evolving manufacturing ecosystem. It

will comprise of mainly three categories, namely

processes, equipment and systems. These main

classes include manufacturing skills related to

knowledge and optimization, control and human-

machine interfaces, logistics and information flow,

creativity and innovation.

On the basis of this framework, the project will

define a vision on new approaches for awareness

creation and training for the rapid build-up of

manufacturing skills, using ICT enabling

technologies. This vision will be reflected on a

roadmap that will identify and give insight on the

training technologies and approaches that will attract

the young talent in manufacturing education and

create engineers with manufacturing skills required

by the factories of the future. The roadmap will be

coordinated with both European SME ICT providers

and users, for the development of future

manufacturing skills, related to advanced

manufacturing. This roadmap will have to drive the

knowledge delivery mechanisms and the ICT

technologies needed for assimilating the identified

manufacturing skills, in the context of the future

factories. In addition, the project will undertake an

aggressive social awareness of the roadmap by

European society, resorting to both traditional media

(e.g. broadcast television, internet, press, etc.) and

social media strategies with viral impact (i.e. social

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networks, gamified apps, etc.). Existing ICT tools

that can contribute to the rapid build-up of

manufacturing skills will have to be enhanced and

extended, while the need for new tools will be

identified. The aim will be to boost competitiveness

and innovation in European manufacturing that

would be requiring a workforce with advanced

manufacturing skills.

3.1 Additional Steps

Some of the required steps to bring about desired

impact have been already mentioned in the previous

paragraphs. Additional steps that ManuSkills will

take are summarized as follows:

 ManuSkills project will involve relevant

stakeholders as part of the development and

deployment process, i.e. there will be meetings,

seminars and other events with representatives

from educational and research authorities and

associations as well as for the relevant interest

groups (e.g. primary/secondary school teachers,

parents representatives, researchers, university

professors) within the STEM education.

 Building on existing professional networks of

teachers and teacher associations will provide

opportunities to disseminate ManuSkills results

and furthermore foster cooperation between

schools, collaborative reflection, exchange of

ideas and experiences and quality development.

 There will be constant communication of results

and participation in discussions through relevant

channels (such as newspaper, television,

journals, conferences, web blogs etc.) through

the whole duration of the project. The main

results emerging from ManuSkills project are

very likely to get a wide audience and a direct

impact on debates in national and international

contexts.

 Most of the project partners have already

established networks with high schools,

universities and industry in their countries and

have been purposely chosen to participate and

contribute to ManuSkills in order to build the

community of stakeholders and reach the

desired impact through established channels.

The stakeholders within established networks

all recognize the importance of STEM in a

knowledge based society and the urgent need to

enhance young people’s interest towards STEM.

3.2 European Added Value

ManuSkills needs to take into the consideration the

large European context as the TEL solutions to be

implemented in schools, which are applicable within

one context (i.e. within one country), could not

simply be transferrable to other contexts (i.e. other

countries). ManuSkills project is also following the

initiative “Science Education NOW” (EU, 2007)

which recommends that the articulation between

isolated national activities in STEM education and

those funded at the European level must be

improved.

Several barriers can emerge in the deployment

process of the ManuSkills ICT Framework (such as

infrastructural barriers, accessibility barriers,

legislative and education policy obstacles, lack of

means to ensure long-term sustainability etc.) and in

the European context; all these barriers strongly

differ from country to country. ManuSkills will do

the analysis of the present state of the different

educational systems and corresponding institutional

practices in the partners’ countries to identify

country specific drivers and barriers (e.g. related to

curriculum and pedagogy, infrastructure, capacity-

building, language and content, financing etc.) to

ensure the wide implementation of the ManuSkills

results in different European contexts.

4 EXPECTED IMPACT

The expected higher level impacts of the ManuSkills

project are the following:

 Penetrate new application areas (e.g. high

customisation, end-of-life product engineering

and manufacturing), close to the market and

opening new markets;

 Strengthen supply-side SMEs by enabling them

to supply manufacturers with new equipment

and components for improved manufacturing

operations;

 Leveraging innovation capacity and

competitiveness of European producers of laser

manufacturing equipment and their suppliers, in

particular SMEs, and of the users of such

equipment;

ManuSkills will contribute only indirectly to the

above impacts through the preparation of new

generations to become eager for developing skills in

advanced manufacturing and contribute in the

increased competitiveness of European

manufacturing industry.

We think that the main strategic impact

generated by ManuSkills will be addressing the

shortage of talented skills in manufacturing. The

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World Economic Forum report “The Future of

Manufacturing. Opportunities to drive economic

growth” (WEF, 2012) is stated:

“An estimated 10 million jobs globally with

manufacturing organizations cannot be filled today

due to a growing skills gap. Despite the high

unemployment rate in many developed economies,

companies are struggling to fill manufacturing jobs

with the right talent. Emerging nations cannot fuel

their growth without more talent. Access to talent

will become more important and more competitive.

The skills gap that exists today will not close in the

near future, which means companies and countries

that can attract, develop and retain the highest

skilled talent – from scientists, researchers and

engineers to technicians and skilled production

workers – will come out on top. In the race to future

prosperity, nothing will matter more than talent.”

We believe that ManuSkills main impact will be

to contribute in reducing this gap, by increasing in

the young talented people the awareness of a

potential interesting professional career in the

manufacturing sectors.

Anyhow more detailed direct impacts created by

ManuSkills will be generated by the produced

results in medium-long term and short, term as

follows. Being medium-long term the quantification

of the impact is vepry difficult to be done.

 To increase the competitiveness of the European

companies by providing them the talented

skilled workers;

 Innovation is more and more dependent on

talented scientists and technicians. ManuSkills

will help have an impact on the Europe 2020

Flagship Initiative on Innovation Union;

 To raise the awareness of publishers and

learning content providers towards the growing

demand of adapted manufacturing education

taking into accounts the rapid evolution of

technology and the inspirations of the young

people. This will increase the quantity and the

quality of the education content available in

internet and easy to be reached;

 Systematic approach for continuous

reinforcement of manufacturing by emerging

technologies through developing strategies for

providing appropriate training to acquire the

related skills;

 Putting the humans at the centre of interest in

manufacturing to remain competitive and

innovative through institutionalisation of

continuous and lifelong learning of the

employees to improve their skills and increase

their capabilities.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This envisaged evolution brings new needs for skills

development. The adaptation of the educational

content and its delivery mechanisms to the new

requirements of knowledge-based manufacturing,

the provision of integrated engineering

competencies, including a variety of soft skills, the

promotion of the innovation and entrepreneurship

spirits, as well as an interdisciplinary thinking,

reflecting the increasing integration of different

areas of knowledge in manufacturing, are considered

as major priorities.

The ActionPlanT project has delivered a

validated set of recommendations and guidelines for

an effective development of ICT for manufacturing

skills. On top of that, the ManuSkills project will

deliver an ICT framework and a roadmap for

manufacturing awareness and skills development

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research leading to these results has received

funding from the European Community's Seventh

Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under

grant agreement n° 609147.

The work in the ManuSkills project is a common

effort among all its contributing partners: Aalborg

University, EPFL, Dassault Systèmes, HighSkillz,

POLIMI, SINTEF and University of Patras.

REFERENCES

ActionPlanT (2011), ICT FOR MANUFACTURING: The

ActionPlanT Vision for Manufacturing 2.0.

Economist (2012), A third industrial revolution, Special

report: Manufacturing and innovation, April 2012,

http://www.economist.com/node/21552901.

EU (2007). Science Education NOW! – Renewed

Pedagogy for the Future of Europe. Brussels:

European Commission, High Level Group on Science

Education.

WEF (2012), The Future of Manufacturing. Opportunities

to drive economic growth, World Economic Forum.

April 2012.

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