Making sense of digitalisation

WILL KINGHORN, a technology advisor from Made Smarter, started things off looking at what a smart factory is, and the associated benefits, along with some examples of Made Smarter’s work and pointers on how to get started with digitalisation.

Made Smarter is a UK government-funded programme which was started in 2018 in response to a review that suggested the UK lags behind when it comes to adopting technology. Starting with a pilot on the Nroth West, as of this year, Made Smarter operates in all regions of England and plans to expand across the UK in the coming years.

“We’re not about turning up and putting a robot on the shop floor and saying, get on with it,” Kinghorn emphasised. “It’s very much around looking at the issues or the ambitions of each company and recommending appropriate technology that they can implement, and then helping them along the way.” Support includes roadmaps, grant funding of up to £20,000, workforce development programmes, access to funded training, and funding for interns.

Integration is key

At the heart of the smart factory concept lies data. For Kinghorn, it means “collecting data from all across the business, analysing that and then using it to make informed decisions and make it more efficient.” The challenge is that most SMEs have multiple, disconnected systems: job cards on paper, machine logs stored locally, finance data in Excel, or training records on separate platforms. Integration is key.

Kinghorn sees potential benefits in terms of increasing effieiency. “If you understand the detail of how often your machines run, or, more importantly, why they're stopped, you can start to put improvement projects in place to make those run more often,” he said. “Or if you put sensors on your machines to understand how much energy they're using, either when they're running, when they're idling, or when no one's in the factory, you can start to reduce the amount of energy you're using and money you're paying for that energy. You can also kind of improve your waste as well.”

He also pointed to improvements in quality, tracability, visibility for customers and staff safety and job satisfaction.

“I think we've all had that experience of having to copy different bits of information into three different spreadsheets or different software packages or write things out a number of times for different departments. If you remove those frustrations in a job by using technology and make things more efficient, the people doing that job will enjoy work more, and they'll produce more and they'll feel more rewarded as a result of that.”

Kinghorn went on to reference several case studies: Joshua Greaves, a manufacturer of mixing machines, replaced paper-based processes with barcoding and resource planning tools, cutting lead times from four weeks to just two days. Fashion brand Derek Rose digitised design and pattern cutting, reducing R&D cycles from months to minutes while maximising fabric yield. Meanwhile, Crystal Doors began with machine monitoring and energy optimisation, gradually building to a full factory-wide dashboard. Their phased approach culminated in achieving B Corp certification and carbon neutrality for scopes one and two.

The lesson, according to Kinghorn, is not to attempt a wholesale transformation overnight. “Start with one particular issue or one particular area… talk to the people in that area, explain what you want to do, and move from there.”

In practice, that might mean installing simple machine sensors, introducing a shared production dashboard, or digitising job cards. Each small improvement builds momentum and confidence for the next stage.

Kinghorn also highlighted the ecosystem of support available, from local growth hubs and enterprise partnerships to research institutions like the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and university robotics centres. For SMEs, this landscape of funded advice, training, and technology expertise lowers the barrier to entry.

Networking perspective

The second speaker of the day, James Stokes, solution consultant and manager of discrete automation at Belden looked at digitalisation from a networking perspective.

He began by stressing the untapped potential of existing assets: “Every day in plants, there are missed connections, or the potential to get more data from what it is that you’re already doing.”

With smarter devices and richer telemetry, insights can be drawn from metrics such as energy use, equipment temperature, and throughput at different points in production. This data, when captured and acted upon, can drive significant performance improvements.

Belden positions itself at the intersection of two historically separate domains: industrial automation and smart infrastructure. “They’re two pretty different worlds,” Stokes explained. “The demands are different, the types of products you see are different, and the approach is quite different in both of these areas.” However, market dynamics are driving convergence. As data volumes grow, plants increasingly require IT-style infrastructure; higher bandwidth, improved management capabilities, and remote access.

“We see the need for fewer industrialised devices and more IT-style devices with either processing power or I/O throughput. But for sure, there is still a place for real automation devices,” noted Stokes.

Layered approach

To address this convergence, Belden applies a layered, or stack-based, approach. From sensors, I/O blocks, and PLCs, through SCADA and MES systems, and ultimately into the cloud, Belden seeks to provide “a step at every part of the data journey.” This is necessary because traditional architectures, such as the Purdue or ISA-95 automation pyramid, while useful, have created limitations. They often result in isolated “islands of automation” where devices from different vendors cannot easily interoperate.

“That’s not necessarily a problem until you want to start getting data out and into a common format for analysis,” Stokes observed.

The company advocates moving toward a new “pillar-shaped model” of networking that better supports modern industrial data flows. This model emphasises reducing load on critical systems, harmonising protocols, and enabling dedicated data channels for analytics. By creating a common infrastructure, organisations can avoid bottlenecks, enable data lakes, and prepare for future demands.

When considering digitalisation projects, Stokes emphasised that networking is often not the trigger but is always an enabler. “Without the network, the information will not flow beyond the production cell, and it will not go from A to B,” he cautioned. 

The first step, therefore, is visibility: taking inventory of what exists today. Belden promotes a five-pillar assessment framework—facility, functionality, maintainability, modernity, and security—as a way to benchmark network readiness. Security, in particular, is becoming critical with regulations like NIS2 in Europe. Even simple measures, such as deploying VLANs, can represent significant cybersecurity progress for some operators.

Addressing network design, Stokes noted that many engineers instinctively start with topology; in contrast, Belden recommends beginning with applications and data paths. “Our starting point actually becomes the application level and the data paths,” he explained, ensuring that critical traffic such as PLC-to-PLC or safety communications are prioritised and segregated from non-critical data. Routing, subnetting, and managed switches then provide further layers of control, visibility, and resilience. Only then should the physical layer – ie. the cabling and plant topology – be finalised.

Stokes cautioned that while connecting a plant can be relatively straightforward, building a resilient, secure, and future-proof network is not. “To do it in the right way requires some expertise and experience,” he said, noting that networks in industrial environments must often serve lifecycles of a decade or more, and that success lies in incremental steps, guided by both current realities and long-term goals.

The digital thread

The third expert to speak on the day was Gavin Hill, Senior Theme Lead for Digital at the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), who explored the concept of the digital thread, its challenges, and its implementation in manufacturing. The AMRC has a particular role in bridging “the middle ground, to transition things from academic ideas through to basically something that you can implement,” said Hill, noting that the Centre’s remit spans the entire product lifecycle, from design and prototyping through manufacture, validation, and in-service feedback. This full lifecycle perspective underpins the AMRC’s approach to the digital thread.

One less than ideal aspect of digitalisation that Hill acknowledged is the widespread confusion around terminology, emphasising his point with a ‘buzzword bingo card’. He noted that the field is saturated with terms such as ‘model-based systems engineering’,  ‘digital tapestry,’ and ‘model-based maintenance’, which can all have different meanings depending on who you are talking to! As Hill explained: “When I say model-based systems engineering to Charlotte, she’s got one interpretation of it. When I say it to James, he’s going to have a different interpretation… it makes the problem worse and worse.”

To cut through this, AMRC deliberately frames its work around the digital thread, offering a consistent reference point without dismissing alternative perspectives. 
Defining the concept, Hill explained: “The digital thread is all of the data that relates to a product as it goes through that entire life cycle.”

This can encompass everything from CAD requirements and machine programs to sensor feedback, robotic work instructions, and in-service maintenance records. The scope can be broad or deliberately constrained depending on the business case, but the essence is the continuity of data. For the UK’s High Value Manufacturing centres, Hill noted, a shared formal definition has been adopted to maintain clarity.

Implementation strategies, he stressed, depend heavily on organisational scale, risk appetite, and return on investment priorities. Some firms may pursue an end-to-end approach, integrating data across all lifecycle stages. Others may have a more narrow focus, for instance, on ensuring coherence between requirements and design.

Benefits of the digital thread identified by Hill include traceability, regulatory compliance, consistency of information (“a single source of truth”), and the ability to apply AI and machine learning for predictive maintenance and process optimisation. Hill pointed that these advantages can translate directly into speed and efficiency: “Fundamentally, the overarching piece here is that everything can be done faster.”

Core elements

On the technical side, Hill outlined five core elements of a robust digital thread architecture: reliable data acquisition (often from sensors and legacy machine retrofits); shop-floor connectivity; manufacturing execution systems (MES); product lifecycle management (PLM); and enterprise resource planning (ERP). For SMEs, two or three of these may suffice, but data is always foundational.

Drawing on experience of AMRC’s own implementation of MES and PMS Siemens, Hill reflected candidly: “Walking in, we knew it was going to be hard, we knew it was going to be expensive… What we saw in reality, though, was that everything was just harder and slower.”

Timescales stretched from six months to over eighteen, costing upwards of £600,000, with challenges in configuration, vendor alignment, and change management.

Hill described AMRC’s UAV demonstrator, a complex aerospace assembly chosen to showcase digital thread integration. By linking requirements through CAD, simulation, and configuration management, AMRC demonstrated how design variations – such as doubling range or halving payload – could automatically propagate through models, analyses, and design iterations. This project highlighted the potential of the digital thread to deliver rapid, data-driven design agility in practice.

Watch on-demand

This review provides just a taste of what was covered in the webinar, which also included an informative and wide-ranging roundtable discussion, including questions submitted by the audience on the day. If you would like to find out more, you can watch the webinar on-demand for free via the following link:

wbmwebinars.com/smarter-futures-driving-efficiency-with-industrial-digitalisation/live