Objective:

Even if SMEs are well aware of the susceptibility of their supply chains to disruption, there is a lack of prerequisites for setting themselves up in a resilient manner. Production processes are too inflexible and order processes are inefficient and lack transparency. In addition, expensive redundancies cannot be maintained and there is too little collaboration within the supply chain.

The RegioFab project aims to develop approaches for bringing together manufacturing companies with surplus production capacities and companies with capacity bottlenecks on a regional basis. The development, implementation and use of regional factory sharing can serve as a catalyst for overcoming these obstacles in the future. This increases the resilience and competitiveness of companies. The aim of the project is to show SMEs options for action with which they can strengthen their resilience and sustainability and make informed decisions - as an alternative to global supply chains and the associated dependencies.

Procedure:

Using three use cases, the project partners are developing and testing methods and tools that SMEs can use to make themselves more resilient and sustainable and create the conditions for the introduction of factory sharing. The broad range of production technologies used by the participating companies will be used to gain generalizable insights and transfer them into practice.

• Use case 1 examines how companies can make their production processes and the use of machines, systems and human labor more flexible and agile.
• Use case 2 examines how companies can use digitalization to make their planning and order processing procedures and production-related services more transparent and efficient.
• Use case 3 examines how companies can change their value-added relationships to create regional value-added networks.

To this end, the use cases first analyze the existing framework conditions in the companies and identify requirements. Measures are then developed and tested in the companies. Finally, the findings are transferred into generalizable catalogs of measures.

In addition, methods and tools will be developed on the basis of the latest scientific findings to enable companies to evaluate their value creation configurations in terms of their resilience and sustainability.

In addition to the conception and design of matchmaking to bring together capacity providers and demanders, taking into account resilience and sustainability criteria, a business model for the operation of regional factory sharing networks will be developed as part of the project.

Project duration:

• January 2025 - December 2027

Project consortium:

• Company partners: Fiber Engineering GmbH, Maus GmbH, Plus Manufact GmbH, Schäfer Kunststofftechnik GmbH, 4flow SE
• Research partners: Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences - Institute for Learning and Innovation in Networks (ILIN), Technical University of Munich - Institute for Machine Tools and Industrial Management (iwb)

Employees of the ILIN:

• Marco Baumgartner
• Sebastian Beiner
• Patrick Fomferra
• Kartik Tambe

The research and development project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the program "Future of Value Creation - Research on Production, Services and Work" in the funding measure "KMU-innovativ: Future of Value Creation" (funding code: 02J23C000) and supervised by the Project Management Agency Karlsruhe (PTKA). The responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the authors of this publication.