• Member companies such as AIS Vision Systems, the Eurecat Technology Center, Schneider Electric, HP, Tai Smart Factory or Font Packaging have wanted to participate in the fifth edition of Advanced Factories
• Xavier Ferràs inaugurated the Industry 4.0 Congress who stressed the importance of generating innovation with structures such as clusters

The Packaging Cluster has collaborated one more year with the strategic innovation event for industry and automation in Barcelona, the Advanced Factories, as Supporting Partners of the event. That is why on June 8, the cluster team traveled to the Barcelona International Convention Center to once again set foot in a face-to-face fair, which housed more than 280 robotics solutions, IoT, artificial intelligence, software or data analytics, among other things.

The Advanced Factories is an essential appointment for the manufacturing sector in which to discover the innovations that are transforming the manufacturing lines with the technologies that surround Industry 4.0. From June 8 to 10, it has become the first face-to-face fair and congress held in Catalonia in 2021, with the latest solutions in industrial automation, robotics, Digital Manufacturing, 3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Twin, Integration Systems, vision artificial and all those that improve the competitiveness of the industry. All this from the hand of more than 200 exhibiting firms, among which are companies such as Accenture, Beckhoff, Infaimon, Omron, Bosch-Rexroth, Siemens, T-Systems, Tecnalia, Telefónica Tech, Universal Robots, Wonderware, Aggity, Sicnova, Schaeffler or Weidmüller; and with entities associated with the cluster such as the Eurecat Technology Center, HP, Schneider Electric, Tai Smart Factory or AIS Vision Systems.

More than 260 experts have given presentations during the three days, including Xavier Ferràs, ESADE professor of innovation, Lali Soler, director of Big Data and Data Science at EURECAT, Faouzi Grebici, Industrial Solutions Europe at Omron, Emili Anglés, Information Systems Manager of Kellogg's, Alberto Carneros, of ALSTOM, or the consulting firm Isabella Zackzek, who have shared their experiences on the transformation of the industry to demonstrate how the future of the sector and the improvement of the competitiveness of industrial plants goes through the automation, robotics and the massive use of 4.0 technologies. In addition, professionals from renowned companies such as SEAT, Ficosa, Gestamp, Fluidra, Damm, Tetrapack, Sandhar or Renfe presented their success stories at the Industry 4.0 Congress.

This year, the congress has had different sessions aimed at giving the keys to take advantage of European NextGenerationEU funds. “Our SMEs have a great opportunity with these resilience and recovery funds and we must ensure that they really reach small and medium-sized companies in our country so that the industry can bet on R&D, reindustrialization and automation, digitization and robotics to generate this change in the production model that will make us more competitive”, explained Albert Planas, General Manager of Advanced Factories.

To finish, Advanced Factories has had different networking events in which to find partners, establish synergies and create alliances, such as the Leadership Summit or the Factories of the Future Awards 2021, awards that have received more than 170 nominations. The technological tours, designed by Nebext together with PIMEC and the AER, also stood out, so that SMEs can discover the latest techniques in advanced production, as well as the Catalonia Market 4.0, in collaboration with ACCIÓ and the Generalitat de Catalunya, or the Industry Startup Forum, in which startups with the most innovative solutions for the industry presented their projects in front of industrial leaders and investors. In addition, this year, Advanced Factories hosted three 3D Printing seminars from HP.