Welcome to ASTUTE

Breakfast Sessions: Product and Service Innovation for Manufacturing, please register here

Promoting Advanced Manufacturing in Wales - a workshop series  organised by ASTUTE and Coleg Sir Gar, please register here 

Advanced Sustainable Manufacturing Technologies Improving competitiveness of the manufacturing sector in West Wales and the Valleys

Advanced Sustainable Manufacturing Technologies (ASTUTE) aims to enable the manufacturing industry in West Wales and the Valleys to grow by adopting more advanced technologies, and at the same time improve its sustainability by reducing its environmental impact etc.

This will be achieved by a Partnership of Universities throughout Wales that will harness the engineering, science and business expertise within them to improve the economic prosperity of the Convergence Region. ASTUTE has been part-funded by the EU’s Convergence European Regional Development Fund through the Welsh Government.

The £27million project targets the aerospace and automotive sectors, as well as other high technology manufacturing companies to create sustainable, higher value goods and services and bring them to a global market. The project is led by Swansea University, in collaboration with the Universities of Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff, Cardiff Metropolitan, Glyndŵr, Swansea Metropolitan, and the University of Wales, Newport.

Since the start of the project in May 2010, ASTUTE has already worked succesfully with a number of Welsh companies in different sectors. Mr Mike Evans, the MD of EBS Automation Ltd in Llanelli and the Group Chairman of the Carmarthenshire Manufacturing Group said:

“We [EBS] are already participating in one project and have signed up for another.  The only factor that prevents us from doing more is the availability of the ASTUTE team’s time … the importance of the support provided by this project to SMEs should not be under estimated by anyone in such challenging times where the demands of the customer base -small to multi-national- are increasing.  The output of the project work can make the difference between success or failure for the SME.”

If you are a manufacturing enterprise (self-employed, SME or non-SME) in West Wales and the Valleys, please contact us for further information.