Reflexion
Nourishing high-tech manufacturing with valuable high-quality data
Source: ITEA4 magazine
The next step forward for the high-tech systems manufacturing domain is to integrate operational data into a product’s development lifecycle. However, as industry increasingly shifts towards complex, digitised systems in which every component generates data, R&D remains largely dependent on legacy engineering choices. Typically, more than 20% of R&D budgets is spent on issues caused by poor quality, sometimes amounting to over 5% of total revenues. Industry executives are thus entering the ‘awareness’ stage: while there is an understanding that data can lead to improved processes, less is understood about the necessary roadmaps to get there. Many companies now operate data pipelines to send information back to headquarters, yet this data is often low quality and delivers no value in generating new business models. Domain-specific knowledge and data science must be combined.
Reflexion introduced another perspective of data exploitation providing a new added value
The challenge taken up by the ITEA project Reflexion, comprising eight partners from Belgium and the Netherlands, was to support the paradigm shift emerging in high-tech industry from selling ‘boxes’ to supporting ‘integrated solutions’, by providing significant improvements in quality and stability during early product rollout.
The objectives were defined as follows: to react to unforeseen problems or emerging needs in a fast, cost-effective way by augmenting products with an introspective layer of data sensing and data analytics, thereby creating value out of the high-tech system’s operational data which is still characterised by legacy choices based on infrastructural and analytical approaches. Then propagate this knowledge (automatically) back into the product development lifecycle and the service & maintenance flow.
As a result, the market penetration for the participating tool and service providers grew by 10%
Source: ITEA 4 magazine July 2021