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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MANU-SQUARE (MANUfacturing ecoSystem of QUAlified Resources Exchange)

Teaser

Summary

MOTIVATION
Servitization is nowadays a common trend that has been embraced by many companies in a wide set of industrial sectors moving income generation from the sale of the physical production output to charging the customer for the availability of a service that the product realises.
This has been applied already both to consumer goods and to capital goods as companies are more and more willing to sell (and buy) manufacturing capacity instead of new equipment making the manufacturing as a service (MaaS) paradigm arise.
Yet this transformation is limited to a change in the bilateral business relationship between machine producers and manufacturers and therefore it doesnâ€™t consider systemic effects, such as capacity underuse and suboptimal value networks, thus still retaining the European manufacturing system from unleashing its full potential. Also opportunities for reuse of wastes or by-products within the industrial ecosystem difficultly emerge thus limiting their enforcement. A step beyond servitization is required.
It appears evident that, to fully achieve the MaaS paradigm, an aggregation and information sharing point is required to give visibility to the manufacturing capacity that any company may want to make available at any location and in any particular field of the European industrial ecosystem. In parallel, the acquisition and formalisation of the production demand is also needed to set up the counterpart for the matching and systemic optimisation. Endowing this matching marketplace with reputation mechanisms capable to raise an environment of mutually trusting partners is a key step for abating barriers to markets and to open the doors to innovative ideas who may never reach them otherwise.
This characteristic is particularly relevant to either small or new businesses in high-tech sectors seeking for the right supplier or competence who may see their effort hindered by lack of visibility leading to incapacity to find the right partners. To this regards the approach brought forth by the MANU-SQUARE project is key to ensure that the generation process of innovative product-services is supported by a fast and effective match of articulated demand and available supply. In fact, by exploiting the platform-enabled marketplace, technology savvy brokers have the proper visibility over system capacity and can easily arrange scope-driven value networks leveraging on the underlying aware and reactive industrial ecosystem with mutual benefits to both providers and users of manufacturing services.
Attempts to establish the MaaS paradigm in this way have already begun and resulting manufacturing platforms are available either to specific domains, such as 3D Hubs for the additive manufacturing, or to regional ecosystems, such as MakeTime, now Xometry, in the US. This makes the timing for this action really urgent if Europe is to lead this transformation and position itself on the edge of what will be in the next years a disrupting change in the way business is today conceived.

OBJECTIVES
Objective 1 [O1] â€“ To make European unused manufacturing capacity emerge towards its reintegration in the loop and the creation of local efficient value networks
Objective 2 [O2] â€“ To support innovative SMEs and start-ups in finding the optimal suppliers to transform their business ideas into new product-services
Objective 3 [O3] â€“ To seamlessly involve actors all along the entire value network including consumers for cross-fertilisation of product-service solutions and underlying technologies
Objective 4 [O4] â€“ To coordinate the whole MANU-SQUARE ecosystem towards a better use of resources and a more sustainable European manufacturing

Work performed

WP1 - A stakeholder analysis has been carried out involving internal and external potential users to early figure out their needs and interest. A specifications map has been drawn as a first step to identify platform functionalities, group them into service packages and define software tools that support them. Demonstration scenarios have been outlined for the involved pilots. All these results have been converted into the MANU-SQUARE reference framework.

WP2 - A semantic representation management of the MANU-SQUARE ecosystem has been designed and implemented building on its elementary blocks. Starting from a meta-model containing the elementary propositions that generalise the key abstract concepts, sectorial domain ontologies have been created by capturing end-users knowledge. Context-specific models capable to support tool functionalities have been created. Finally inference rules working on the ontology have been developed in a reasoning system.

WP3 - A blockchain infrastructure for supporting the platform functionalities has been developed. This allows to 1- enrich and feed the platform also with data from IoT devices so supporting tracking of resources along the value network, 2- track transaction that occur on the platform so supporting the reputation mechanism and creating a factual basis for disputes resolution. Moreover, the main platform graphical user interfaces have been designed and implemented towards the release of a minimum viable platform.

WP4 - Platform tools have been designed and first prototypal version released. A match making service for connecting demand and supply has been developed as the core distinctive element of the platform. A reputation mechanism for mutual trust between platform users has been put in place. A sustainability assessment layer for attaching environmental impacts to the platform transactions has been designed and enriched with a unified flow manager for ecosystem orchestration. An idea manager has been included for promoting open innovation on the platform.

WP6 - not active yet

WP5 - A BPMN depicting the overall behaviour of the platform has been modelled. Service canvas and blueprints have been created to understand the value and design the behaviour of the different platform elements. An early platform business model has been drafted.

WP7 - An embryonic community around the MANU-SQUARE platform has been initiated relying on workshops at EU level, dissemination actions in conferences and fairs and through the use of social media where the project has landed. Early plans for the exploitation of project results have been sketched.

Final results

MANU-SQUARE aims at revolutionizing the way manufacturing companies in Europe share production capacity, technology, know-how and materials getting the most out of internet-based platform approaches and effectively addressing the most relevant criticalities currently hampering the spread of these sharing approaches in the manufacturing B2B market.
MANU-SQUARE proposes a multi-sided business model pattern that can be deployed in different shapes in accordance to the target user. This requires:
- fusion of physical and digital industries leading to a platform-enabled marketplace of manufacturing services;
- integration of cross-sectorial technologies and competences to leverage on full open innovation potential;
- enabling of chained platforms to foster secure creation and handling of reconfigurable value networks.
Main expected results are: the manufacturing marketplace platform based on blockchain, a sustainability assessment layer, an open innovation co-design idea management tool, a unified flow ecosystem orchestrator, a dedicated matching service and the MaaS-based ecosystem business model.