Supply Chain
What is the industry of the future?
What is the Industrie du Futur funding window?
The industry of the future is a term that seems to come out of a science-fiction work, but that in fact designates the national program for modernizing the means of production and the digital transformation of French industrial companies.
The industry of the future is a term that seems to come out of a science-fiction work, but that in fact designates the national program for modernizing the means of production and the digital transformation of French industrial companies.
In 2015, a painful observation was made: France was lagging behind in the industrial sector.
Concretely, this program aims to address this lag by helping French companies regain their competitiveness and reestablish their position in international competition thanks to the productivity gains linked to new technologies.
Bpifrance lists 8 components to this support program:
The modernization of production tools
The digitization of industry
The incentive to develop new strategies
The incentive to rethink the business model
Organizational and social change
The opportunity to become competitive again
Customized production at the cost of mass production
The technological building blocks that make it possible to increase the productivity, quality, safety, and traceability of goods and processes.
What is the Vitrine Industrie du Futur label?
The Alliance Industrie du Futur, a not-for-profit association (1901 law) working in favor of modernizing manufacturers' tools and a founding member of the French Fab, created the "Vitrine Industrie du Futur" (Industry of the Future showcase) label, awarded to companies that have taken this turn by adopting, in particular, various new technologies.
The Vitrine Industrie du Futur label has several objectives:
Promoting the French technological and digital offering at the national and international level, capitalizing on the successes of their first achievements, across all sectors.
Demonstrating the operational performance of production lines and processes, and the value created for the company while placing people at the heart of the transformation undertaken.
Driving an industrial momentum through the sharing of success stories aimed at inspiring and promoting good practices.
The French government also supports its industrial strength thanks to a recovery plan that allows SMEs and mid-caps "to benefit from cash-flow support concurrently with their transformation investments toward the industry of the future. The aid takes the form of a subsidy for the acquisition of an asset recorded under fixed assets and allocated to an industrial activity on French territory. The amount of the aid and the list of eligible assets are defined by decree and by order."
What does the adoption of new technologies imply for companies in the industrial sector?
To put it simply, a return to competitiveness on the international stage will happen if companies in the industrial sector prioritize the creation of maximum value.
Automation, robotics, or other types of innovations based on AI represent these new technologies that will make it possible to produce more, better, faster, in a more sustainable way, and in better conditions (safety...).
While the industry of the future encourages rethinking strategies and business models, this does not necessarily imply upending all existing processes, training all of one's resources, or spending significant sums.
AI can make it possible, among other things, notably via the collection and processing of data, to facilitate or automate processes or tasks that were previously time-consuming or had approximate results, in order to give resources time back to handle tasks with higher added value, with more operational efficiency and carrying more meaning.
Solutions incorporating AI exist today on the market and do not imply drastic changes. They will, for example, bring their users more visibility and predictability on their production, or will help smooth out communication and the sharing of key data.
As an example, Oplit, a production-planning solution that helps manufacturers increase the profitability of their operations by raising their production objectives, works with LISI, a company holding the Vitrine Industrie du Futur label that integrates new technologies at several levels of the company to solve various issues (CSR, quality...). It is these initiatives that the industry of the future wishes to systematize.
What does the adoption of these new technologies imply for people?
The modernization of equipment will nevertheless have an impact on employees and also on their training needs. While not all resources will need to train intensively, a few key positions will have to upskill and the teams will have to be trained on the new tools available. It will then be a matter of taking advantage of the knowledge of the human resources to optimize the use of these technologies as well as possible.
These changes necessarily involve upheavals, even minimal ones, but we can see in this training need the very positive sign that people remain indispensable and that they cannot be replaced any time soon.
