Blog Overview

The Swiss Smart Factory at Switzerland Innovation Park Biel/Bienne

3.1.22
Author: Switzerland Innovation Park Biel/Bienne

The Switzerland Innovation Park Biel/Bienne conducts applied research with a wide network of national and international academic and industry partners. With its Swiss Smart Factory, the SIP Biel/Bienne wants to become the leading Swiss competence center in application-oriented research and the transformation to Industry 4.0.

The SSF Test and Demonstration Factory for Industry 4.0 in Switzerland
The vision of the SSF is to be Switzerland's leading competence center in the area of application-oriented research and the transformation to Industry 4.0. With each project that we invest in,  we expand our ecosystem of partners and the knowledge that benefits all of the participants involved in the fourth industrial revolution.

Since its launch, the SSF has established itself as the first test and demonstration platform for Industry 4.0 in Switzerland. In doing so, it has become a real supermarket of ideas where companies of all sizes can learn and define which technology best meets the needs of their company and their product. As more and more innovation projects are becoming commercially successful, this testing and demonstration infrastructure is constantly updated. Our continuous development creates successive innovation cycles for our clients’ products and services.


The Advantages for Partners of the SSF
To drive forward the digital transformation in production together with its partners, the SSF founded the Association for the Promotion of “Swiss Smart Factory” (AP-SSF).

The membership program for the AP-SSF generated a great deal of interest, and the SSF now already has over 70 members from industry and research. This membership program brings together the key players – big companies, SMEs, start-ups and research partners – so that they can work on setting up, developing and running a cutting-edge Industry 4.0 demonstration factory that acts as a lighthouse concept for Swiss industry.


Digital Transformation Workshop: New Event Format Also Open to Non-Members
One of the advantages of membership is access to exclusive events. The digital transformation workshop also offers non-members the opportunity to profit from the SSF’s knowledge and network, and to gain an insight into what the digital transformation really means.

This workshop offers an insight into the Industry 4.0 smart production lighthouse project so that participants can learn about the subjects of Industry 4.0 and digitization. Topics such as collaborative robotics, 3D printing, OPC unified architecture and IO-Link are introduced by means of demonstrations.

A workshop lasting around two hours then takes place at the SSF’s digital drive system. With the help of application-specific training stations, participants first complete a training session on paper, and then move on to a digital practical session that introduces the topics of RFID, manufacturing execution systems, horizontal and vertical integration, and digital installation instructions.