This tool helps SMEs assess the possibility of adopting both advanced manufacturing solutions as well as social innovation strategies. Thereby transforming their organization through 7 transformation areas towards next-generation factories with more competitive, modern and sustainable production.
As the technological and social innovation expertise of a downstream SME is often quite limited, they often do not exactly know what knowledge, services and equipment is required for their demand. The European ADMA Support Centre centralized the SMEs´ requests and offered a personal contact with Factories of the Future advisors during a 36 month study that started in June 2018. The consortium included both technological and non-technological partners.
ADMA methodology:
The ADMA assessment is based on 7 transformation areas:
T1 – Advanced manufacturing technologies
T2 – Digital factory
T3 – Eco factory
T4 – End to end customer oriented engineering
T5 – Human Centered organization
T6 – Smart manufacturing
T7 – Value chain oriented open Factory
Target audience:
CEOs and management in small and medium companies. Intended for companies with at least 10 employees.
Status:
The ADMA initiative and associated support center is currently no longer active. A follow-up project called ADMA Transformers will be launched around October 2021. You can contact Merete Norby at Mnorby@made.dk to know more about it.
An ADMA inspirational handbook has been published. It showcases testimonials of 15 SMEs that have benefited from the ADMA methodology in the past 3 years. You can download it here.
Disclaimer
The ADMA project is performed on behalf of the European Commission’s Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME) under Service Contract GRO-SME-17-C-063.
A company is considered a factory of the future with an average score of 4 out of 5 for each of the transformation domains. The tool also helps to determine priorities in the further development of the company, without having to aim for this average score.
A company can choose to perform a quick online scan or apply the ADMA methodology extensively:
- Option 1: Perform the Factory of the Future Quick scan (30 questions) or Full scan (58 questions) and get benchmarked on all transformation areas.
- Option 2: A Factories of the Future advisor will guide the company through the ADMA assessment and will provide a transformation plan which will give a clear view on the identified priority areas and the required transformations.
o Step 1: The advisor has an interview (90 minutes) with the business owner/ management covering most of the relevant questions of the 7 main topics and several of the subtopics of the assessment. (Enclosed a one pager of the 7 transformations that we find very useful to use during the interviews.)
o Step 2: The advisor performs a shop floor visit in addition to the interview (60 minutes).
o Step 3: The advisor fills out the ADMA assessment (document enclosed). The result is a ‘shadow scan’.
o Step 4: The SME fills out the scan. At least completed by the CEO. Additional scans completed by the HR manager, R&D department and others are recommended to properly cover the 7 transformation domains.
o Step 5: In a second meeting, the advisor discusses the results with management to arrive at a consolidated score. Possible solutions are not yet provided. The result is an assessment of the company’s ‘as is’ status.
o Step 6 and beyond: Further steps are to provide the company with what we call a ‘transformation plan’.
