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LISI’ s Smart Factory project, led by Taahir and his team, has been successful in creating higher value jobs and career paths within the company, shifting the focus from traditional engineering and introducing new roles around software development and data analysis into the factory. Taahir was awarded the MX Young Manufacturer of the Year in 2023 before helping LISI establish its first Smart Factory line.“ The Smart Factory vision started in 2019 when we scoped out the new production line,” Taahir adds.“ It’ s about using technology to make things faster and more effective. We were successful in receiving £ 975,000 worth of funding from Innovate UK to do the research and development of this project, for this, we partnered with the University of Sheffield AMRC. We developed machines with advanced sensors capable of generating thousands of data points to allow analysis and AI development. We have just recently completed the first phase of machine learning, enabling us to detect when a tool is failing; all thanks to our machine learning( ML) apprentice. This is an amazing achievement for us, considering that we started off with a team of two back in 2019, now we have a team of ten with four apprentices in the team following a dedicated development plan to support future growth of the site.”
With plans for more lines to be split across its sites in California, USA and France, the company’ s strategy for growth includes its LISI Excellence Achievement Program which centers around continuous improvement processes. The program was an integral part of supporting the business through Covid,
I always believe that fighting spirit is in our DNA and has got us through a lot of challenging times in recent years
while also preparing for the future.“ We were always planning to recover from the pandemic and continue growing,” explains Mark.“ We didn’ t have a lot of financial support throughout that process, due to the challenges being faced by the industry, although LISI Group strongly backed the idea. It was a bit of a leap of faith, after which we began receiving small amounts of funding to invest in our equipment. We then made the decision in 2021 to divert a large part of our CapEx budget into the Smart Factory machine. Having that strategy process to ensure that everybody in the team could contribute helped us get through 2021 and 2022. Our real breakthrough was in 2023, when we were beginning to deliver the results both organizationally and with the manufacturing process. LISI Group then started to increase the amount of funding
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