Shaping European Manufacturing: The Role of Advanced Technologies

The manufacturing industry is a strong asset of the European economy, accounting for 2 million enterprises and 33 million jobs. Europe's competitiveness is highly dependent on the ability of this sector to deliver high-quality innovative products using the latest advances in ICT. Certain technologies, such as Industrial Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Cloud Computing, have a great impact on manufacturing. The adoption of these new technological possibilities will have consequences for the production process, by lowering the cost of production, improving the speed of operations and minimizing errors. The factories of the future need to deal with competitive pressures and incorporate new technologies, applications and services and in this context policymakers and other influential actors play a fundamental role in the establishment of frameworks that provide some degree of certainty to companies in designing their investment strategy.

The event was structured in two main sessions:

• In the first session, we set the scene giving an overview of the main trends and adoptions of advanced technologies (focus on IIoT, AI, Robotics and Cloud) in the manufacturing sector and informing about the current polcies that are being implemented in the field at the EU level.
• The second session aimed at gathering different viewpoints and experiences about how to plan and implement the digital transformation of manufacturing SMEs. The discussion included contributions both from the EU level and the local level to provide the participants with a full picture of the topic and to encourage them to share their views and formulate requests to policy makers.

Programme