Façade specialist Spanwall has been crowned at this year’s Engineering & Manufacturing Awards, winning the Digital Innovation Award for its Smart Manufacturing initiative.
The judges praised Spanwall’s entry as “a great example of the way in which digital technologies can be used to drive manufacturing efficiency”.
The Smart Manufacturing initiative, which has applied digital technology to streamline processes and workflows, leverages the power of digital twinning for rapid prototyping of its metal façade components before going into full production.
The new technology also allows the live tracking of every component part through each stage of design and manufacturing, delivering real-time reporting for improved efficiency and a completely new level of customer communication, transparency and traceability.
The digital system has integrated multi-disciplinary data to create a truly information-driven product workflow. This allows Spanwall to create and test new metal rainscreen cladding designs for its customers and specifiers more efficiently, whilst optimising manufacturing resources and significantly increasing overall capacity.
Commenting on the accolade, David Clark, managing director of Spanwall, said: “These awards do a fantastic job of recognising and promoting innovation and excellence across the best of UK industry. To win the Digital Innovation Award is a huge accolade for Spanwall and is a real credit to our design and manufacturing teams at every level of our business.”
“We are committed to digital transformation and believe it is fundamental to delivering our core values of innovation, safety and quality to our customers, specifiers, and most importantly, to building owners and occupiers.”
The Smart Manufacturing project represents a significant investment for Spanwall, particularly in the level of testing and validation that was required to implement seamless workflows. The result is shorter lead times and cost reductions of around 80% for digital prototyping of sheet metal components. Machine set-up times for production runs have also been reduced by up to 50%
As Spanwall is often involved in producing highly complex metal façade solutions for large-scale construction projects, identifying potential issues at the earliest design stage is critical for a ‘right first time’ approach. The new digital technology provides increased certainty of project delivery on time and on budget, and to consistently high-quality standards.
The next phase of Spanwall’s digital transformation will apply new technology to integrate quality control, preventative maintenance, health and safety, and estimating into digital workflows.
