January 2022

13 www.drivesncontrols.com January 2022 Themes For NMS 2022 This year’s National Manufacturing Summit will be broken down into the three following themes: Field To Fork, Factory To Door and Fossil Fuels To Renewables. Field To Fork In a world of reduced resources, our food manufacturers and those responsible for the management of our land stock are under increasing pressure to maximise their processes to extract the most value from their work whilst minimising their impact on the environment. With growing challenges of limited human resources to support our farmers and food producers, coupled with growing human demand and changing consumer habits, our agriculture sector, food producers, and the supply chain that gets food on our tables face a series of challenges that require innovation, adoption of new technologies and collaboration throughout the supply chain. There is a growing demand by consumers to eat food produced more locally, to eat less meat, more plant-based foods, and for consumers to know that their food choices aren’t impacting the environment in terms of how it’s grown, manufactured, packaged, transported and sold. This provides new challenges to farmers and food producers, food manufacturers, logistics hauliers and retailers, with every step of the supply chain required to limit their environmental impact. Innovations in automation and robotics to support picking and packing, digitalisation to enhance crop and land management, new materials for packaging and EV’s for logistics are just some of the advancements in existing and future technologies that could support the sector to thrive and scale the summit of its environmental and sustainable challenges. The National Manufacturing Summit will this year host a series of conference sessions showcasing the challenges and potential solutions, and provide a forum to discuss the future opportunities for all those involved in getting our food from field to fork. Factory To Door As consumer demands change, manufacturers, retailers and hauliers need to react and create more sustainable ways to produce, package, retail and deliver their products to consumers. How products are made, the materials used, where these are sourced, how goods are packaged and transported are all of increasing interest to more digitally savvy consumers and play a big part in their spending decisions. At the same time, retailers want to ensure their manufacturers can deliver products more sustainably as they assess their supply chain against new criteria, which is increasingly weighted towards more environmentally conscious methods of manufacture. As technology also increases the opportunities for more personalised products and small batch manufacture, manufacturers have to ensure they can deliver efficiencies in production previously focused on large scale production lines to meet the growing demand for one off products, delivered direct to the consumer. Hauliers and logistics companies that have seen huge increases in demand for smaller deliveries to the home are now reviewing their fleets, identifying how they can utilise electric and hydrogen- based vehicles, and understanding the infrastructure required to deliver goods with minimal environmental impact. As consumers are increasingly won and lost based on a company’s environmental credentials, so too will the large-scale future contracts to produce, package and deliver goods. This means the entire supply chain needs to review how it works and continue to innovate to ensure it can meet these demands and create more sustainable ways to do business. Fossil Fuels To Renewables By 2050 the UK must have achieved net- zero emissions, and by 2035 the law states that we must have reduced our emissions by 78% compared with levels from the 1990s. To achieve this, the UK will need to significantly reduce its reliance on fossil fuels from oil, coal and gas, and work towards a future where clean electricity is able to meet the demands of an ever- growing population. The UK government has set a series of targets and milestones that, combined, can make real inroads into both the 2035 targets for clean electricity and reduced emissions, as well as the overall 2050 net- zero goal. Investment in new renewable projects such as Hornsea One and Two, the world’s largest wind farms, increases in charging points infrastructure for electric vehicles, incentives to buy EV’s and working with OEMs such as Rolls-Royce on the new small nuclear reactor programme, are all strong actions that highlights the government's intentions to remove our reliance on fossil fuels and move to a future driven by cleaner, greener, renewable electricity. This clear focus on renewables provides significant opportunities for UK manufacturing, advanced engineering companies and their supply chains. Businesses will need to adapt, show their agility and seize the opportunities. But those able to scale the summit and create solutions to meet the needs for renewable energy production can become the next generation of global manufacturing success stories, flying the flag for UK innovation in the race to net-zero. Book Your Place Register your free place to attend NMS 2022 in person or virtually by visiting www.nmsummit.co.uk