Meet the next cohort of companies on Made Smarter Innovation Alley

In our first article we met 6 of them – Authentise, Tangent Works, Enable Manufacturing, Certify IT, FloWide and HAL Robotics. Find out more about them here.

Chris Courtney, Challenge Director – Made Smarter Innovation at UKRI, said, “The range of businesses exhibiting on Made Smarter Innovation Alley emphasises the extent of digital technology innovation happening across the UK manufacturing sector.  With everything from AI to robotics, data to sensors and software to planning tools, it’s a fantastic opportunity for manufacturers to experience these technologies in action and find out how they can accelerate their innovation.”

We spoke to Masters of Pie, Productive Machines, xtonnes, InovoRobotics, Nightingale HQ, Plastometrex, FourJaw, Pixelmax, Advai and Orthogonal Engineering to find out what they were looking forward to most about being on the Made Smarter Innovation Alley.

Masters of Pie

Masters of Pie is a software company that delivers XR collaboration solutions for Enterprise. Their software framework, called Radical, delivers the future of collaboration by delivering any kind of data securely to any device. From the automotive, space, aviation, defence, and manufacturing sectors, over 200 global enterprises have licensed Radical to deliver a broad array of XR collaboration use cases.

Karl Maddix, CEO at Masters of Pie, said, “Masters of Pie is excited to be attending the Made Smarter Innovation Alley to showcase our unique approach of taking the real-time XR collaboration solution to the data. This methodology allows our customers to embed the solution into existing software applications and processes while integrating into multiple data repositories to deliver context. The team at Masters of Pie is looking forward to meeting customers and exploring new use cases and industry challenges that the Radical software may be customised to resolve.” 

Productive Machines

Productive Machines is a spinout company from Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre who are developing a web-based service to maximize sustainability of machining processes by reducing costs, eliminating waste, and improving productivity.

Erdem Ozturk, CEO and co-founder at Productive Machines said, “Collaboration is key to achieve Net Zero Carbon Emissions by 2050. There are key technologies which are being developed to enable this target such as electrification and hydrogen powered transportation. Once these technologies are mature and they need to be manufactured, we expect that manufacturing capacity will be a bottleneck to produce the new components required for these technologies. Hence, it is crucial that the manufacturing industry reduces the lead times, cycle times, energy per part, waste and maximizes OEE.  We are looking forward to the Innovation Valley to discuss how Productive Machines can help fulfill these needs and form new collaborations with manufacturing colleagues.”

xtonnes

xtonnes is a next-generation carbon management software built with designers and manufacturers to reduce, remove and report emissions while saving time, money and the planet.  Manufacturers are facing increasing pressure from regulation, investors, customers and end users to decarbonise, and current solutions, normally consultancy, are incredibly expensive.

The xtonnes mission is to make carbon management intuitive and affordable. Their software uses minimal data to help you understand your carbon footprint quickly.  Supporting you to create a Net Zero reduction strategy, the software then empowers you to reduce, remove and report emissions in the most effective way, future-proofing your business.

Dr Andy Hale, Co-founder of xtonnes said, “We’re delighted to be showcasing xtonnes at Made Smarter Innovation Alley.  We know Net Zero, “Science-based targets” and carbon emissions can be abstract concepts for many – but it’s a topic all businesses are going to have to get on top of – and we’re excited to share how to make that easier.”

Inovo Robotics

Inovo’s cobots enable manufacturers to easily automate batch handling tasks that are inefficient for people to do manually. Their modular hardware enables the end user to quickly reconfigure the cobot for physically different tasks. This makes it viable to use a cobot as a generic production tool rather than a single purpose installation. The no code setup means anyone can learn to configure the arm in a few hours and puts the end user in control, enabling you to make fast, cost effective changes as product lines, batches and business needs change.

Henry Wood  said, “We are very excited to be bringing this product to market after more than three years of development, it offers a unique proposition to the manufacturing sector and has the potential to make many products manufactured in the UK more competitive”

Nightingale HQ

Nightingale HQ is a leading provider of AI-powered software that helps manufacturers integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their operations without the need for significant investment in acquiring AI expertise. They have created an easy-to-use platform called GoSmarter that allows any manufacturer with just 1 engineer to support a large change program. GoSmarter enables businesses to easily improve all business functions on one platform – saving time, money, and giving staff more time to focus on what really matters.

Steph Locke CEO at Nightingale HQ said “Manufacturers that aren’t digitalising fast enough will be left behind and those that are, are benefiting from an increase in margins and productivity. Adopting smart tools is one of the best ways to accelerate your digital position and become more competitive, and the best part is that the tech already exists, it’s affordable and becoming more accessible to all – that’s what our GoSmarter platform is all about. We look forward to meeting with the KTN team, collaborators and manufacturers across the UK at Made Smarter Innovation Alley and feeling the wave of innovation from the last 18 months.” 

Plastometrex

Plastometrex is a company founded by a team of materials scientists formerly of The University of Cambridge. They design and deploy next-generation mechanical materials testing solutions that make testing faster and more versatile. Plastometrex’s platform methodology,  Profilometry-based Indentation Plastometry (PIP), can be used to measure full tensile stress-strain curves and metal strength parameters in just 3-minutes. Minimal sample preparation is needed, and real components can be tested. The technology is already being used by leading companies and universities to carry-out high throughput testing, characterise welds and additive manufactured parts, for failure analysis and more.

Mike Coto at Plastometrex said, “Understanding the properties of your materials is of critical importance to a wide array of industries. However, the conventional technology that measures the strength of materials is slow, expensive, and inflexible – in fact it hasn’t changed much over the last 100 years. We are looking forward to engaging with industry leaders at DMW to explore how the rapid acquisition of material property data offered by our new technology could impact their production and R&D activities.”

FourJaw

FourJaw is an innovative manufacturing analytics platform that can be easily installed on any and all CNC machines.  It is the manufacturing industry’s most accessible and affordable real-time machine monitoring solution. It’s never been easier for SME factories to unlock hidden productivity across their shop floors.

Chris Iveson at FourJaw said, “It’s sadly been a challenging few years for British manufacturers. Overseas competition makes it increasingly difficult for SMEs who haven’t yet experienced the productivity gains that can be found from shop-floor digitalisation. Many SMEs are sitting on a mountain of untapped productivity because they don’t believe that Industry 4.0 technologies are accessible to them. We’re attending Made Smarter Innovation Alley to prove them wrong, as FourJaw enables affordable and accessible digital transformation of machine shops of any size.”

Pixelmax

PixelMax has changed how organisations network, promote, inform and educate its users by providing virtual events, digital twinning and product or process simulation. PixelMax made major inroads in the manufacturing, medical and educational arenas in the early days, delivering digital twins and data visualisation techniques that allowed data to be unlocked and quickly understood.

Using the latest in 3D technology, they create  immersive virtual worlds where businesses can  communicate, collaborate and learn. Over the last 18 months their 3D world technology has evolved to offer world first virtual events and more recently to create ‘always on’ 3D environments which businesses are now starting to use as their virtual workplace to compliment their hybrid working model.

Chris Heap said: “In the manufacturing space we have provided 3D tools to allow our clients to optimise the use of their factory space and modelled digital twins of global processes, allowing for simulation of events in real time and predictive analysis of the system response. Our vision as a business is to create harmony between the physical and digital world. We believe that the two should work together to create a better, frictionless reality.” 

Advai

Advai works at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence, exploring the limitations of modern neural network-based systems.  Their technology enables stress testing, validation, assurance and defence of AI, providing companies and data scientists with an entirely new capability to assess their systems.  What truly changes the game is to proactively identify weaknesses in a system; rather than hypothesising how an AI might behave in the wild, Advai predicts how and where it is likely to struggle.  Advai is a UK Startup, backed by the UK MoD’s Defence and Security Accelerator.

David Sully at Advai said: “We are exploring the cutting edge of AI capabilities and understanding the limitations of current technology.  We see this as the way to answer the question “are we happy relying on the machine for fully automating this task?”.  We believe that when a customer has confidence in the Robustness of their AI, only then can they start to deploy it in ever more ambitious ways and really push the limits of the technology itself, which in the manufacturing space could improve areas such as defect detection, quality control and automation.”

Orthogonal Engineering

Orthogonal Engineering utilises Roboze Industrial ARGO series 3D printers to produce accurate and repeatable products with full process control in engineering grade polymers like PEEK. In addition to product manufacture, they also provide design for additive manufacture engineering services and reverse engineering for part re-production or enhancement.

John Niven at Orthogonal Engineering said, “We are delighted to be exhibiting at Made Smarter Innovation Alley, providing us the opportunity to demonstrate that with advances in additive manufacturing and engineering polymers, there are clear engineering and commercial opportunities to replace conventional metal parts with strong, lightweight and accurate polymer parts that will reduce waste and allow for material circularity”.  

Make sure you book your ticket to Digital Manufacturing Week and join us at a showcase of the best of UK manufacturing.

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