Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1140547
98 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2019 after our name and a much better finance bal- ance sheet is hopefully a big risk reduction for them. In early discussions with large global in- terconnect companies about scale-up, having access to capital allows us to say "We'd like to build a self-funded scale-up facility." Matties: We know that smart factories are an important part of the manufacturing sector. On the manufacturing side of your business, what sort of investments are you making? Where are you at in that process? Johnston: We are at a relatively early stage of thinking about it, but we're about to kick off a program in that respect. One of our key mar- kets is aerospace, and traceability is a key re- quirement of the aerospace industry. One of our smart projects is that we would like to be able to have a full product history of each individual product that is going through the whole manufacturing process. We'll be able to call out machine settings, chemistry read - outs, etc., into an embedded history of each individual part. The other facet of it is while we have to make a 60-meter-long circuit on a roll-to-roll basis, it also allows us to make two three-meter-long medical devices in roll- to-roll form. The roll-to-roll process allows us to produce a very machine-intensive manu - facturing process, which is another feature of smart factories. Matties: And there's not necessarily an off-the- shelf smart factory product that you are going to buy and plug in because you have to rely on equipment suppliers and software. So, what's your approach to this? Johnston: We still need to do some research. Part of our program is to see what the off-the- shelf solution is, but we recently bought a new, Jake Kelly and Philip Johnston.