Many manufacturers, especially small and medium-sized companies, struggle to afford the costs of digital upgrades. When a factory’s engineers discover a potential operational improvement, such as a new tool design, they must test it in a real-world environment and collect the data. But manufacturing equipment and production downtime is expensive, so R&D engineers often wait months for internal equipment to become available.
Outcome
MxD has built opportunities for R&D testing on its Future Factory floor, eliminating our partners’ need to buy testing equipment and give up production capacity for experimentation. One of our industry partners, Rolls-Royce, used our facility to test three new manufacturing tools and processes. Testing took less than a week, versus the three months that it would have taken internally, and the innovations are already being implemented at Rolls-Royce.
Completion Date
Ongoing
