DMTC’s “Smart Enough Factory” project is delivering results for Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) companies within the defence supply chain and for university students getting the experience they need to become well-rounded engineers.

The students involved are selected as part of the Victorian Defence Industry Scholarships which is administered by the Ai Group with funding from the Defence Science Institute (DSI) and DMTC.

This partnership brings together the skills of each organisation to deliver a program which provides vital learning opportunities for students in their final year of studies in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.

The “Smart Enough Factory” project is a digital capability uplift program which introduces SME’s to Industry 4.0 principles to improve manufacturing practices and develops greater efficiency through data collection and interpretation in monitoring production flow.

By using “Smart Enough Factory”, the participating business can quickly identify any issues with their manufacturing processes and seek to remedy them before it becomes a systemic issue.

Having real time data about how their factory is performing, managers can make decisions about workloads and the need for extra plant to be added to the process so jobs can be completed on time.

Students involved in the “Smart Enough Factory” rollout get to see firsthand the benefits of Industry 4.0 principles and how modern equipment can be fitted to machines which have been on production lines for years.

In the end businesses benefit from improved manufacturing practices, students get experiences which will only improve their employment opportunities and defence gets a supply chain which is responsive.

To learn more about “Smart Enough Factory” and the work students are undertaking, watch this short video with one of the students who was selected through the Victorian Defence Industry Scholarships https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCE8Se7HLt8