Smart Manufacturing Week 2025, NEC Birmingham: Digital Production & Quality for Vacuum-Insulation at Scale

Smart Manufacturing Week 2025, NEC Birmingham: Digital Production & Quality for Vacuum-Insulation at Scale

Dates attended: 4–5 June 2025
Venue: National Exhibition Centre (NEC), Birmingham, UK
Attendee: Professor Saim Memon, CEO of Sanyou London
Event site: https://www.smartmanufacturingweek.com

Smart Manufacturing Week returned to the NEC as the UK’s festival of advanced manufacturing and engineering, bringing together Smart Factory Expo, Maintec, Drives & Controls, and the Design & Engineering Expo under one roof. The 2025 edition ran 4–5 June, with an extensive, free-to-attend education programme across innovation, digital transformation, sustainability, workforce and supply-chain resilience. The Manufacturer bindt.org foodanddrinknetwork.co.uk

Why this mattered to Sanyou London

Sanyou London’s mission is to take vacuum-insulation energy technologies from laboratory breakthrough to reliable, repeatable manufacturing—so buildings and logistics operators can cut energy waste quickly and at scale. Smart Manufacturing Week offered a concentrated route to assess equipment, software and methods that strengthen this journey.

Focus areas visited:
Smart Factory Expo for digital twins, MES, and analytics; Maintec for reliability and asset-care tooling; Drives & Controls for motion, robotics and safety; and Design & Engineering for materials and process innovation. Smart Manufacturing Week 2025+3Smart Manufacturing Week 2025+3Smart Manufacturing Week 2025+3

What we looked for (and why)

Q: How do we build ultra-thin, high-performance insulation with consistent quality?
A: By connecting a digital thread—from incoming materials to finished product—with inline measurements that prove performance.

Inline metrology & vision: coat-weight, thickness and edge-seal inspection for VIP-based laminates, targeting tighter Cp/Cpk on thermal pathways.
Clean manufacturing: dust, fibre and humidity control to protect vacuum-core performance and edge seals.
Recipe control: MES-driven parameters for lamination pressures, cure times and cutting profiles, recorded for each batch.
Traceability: serialised rolls, panels and kits with QR-backed records of raw lots, process windows and test results to support customer audits.

Q: How do we design for maintainability and uptime?
A: Learnings from Maintec translate directly into VIP and laminate lines—condition monitoring of pumps and heaters; predictive maintenance on conveyors and slitters; spares strategies tied to OEE. Smart Manufacturing Week 2025

Q: Where does workforce development fit?
A: The show’s skills agenda and STEM activity reinforced how cross-skilled teams (operators + data + quality) shorten learning curves on new lines; this is vital as we scale in the UK and with partners overseas. Smart Manufacturing Week 2025 foodanddrinknetwork.co.uk

What this means for projects and partners

Faster qualification: richer technical files with inline data, strengthening UKCA-ready documentation and customer acceptance.
Repeatability: better recipe control and SPC reduce rework, stabilise λ-performance and delivery times.
Serviceability: reliability tooling from the maintenance community lowers downtime on lamination, vacuum preparation and cutting work-cells.

Product lines aligned to the manufacturing upgrades

Vacuum Insulated Wallpaper (VIW): ultra-slim internal wall insulation designed for room-by-room retrofit with tidy finishes and robust batch traceability.
Decorative Integrated VIP (DVIP): façade-ready assemblies combining vacuum cores with architectural skins; serialised for estate-level asset tracking.
Flexible VIP: conformable elements for reveals, services and curved geometries; cut-pattern accuracy improved via vision-guided cells.
VIBB (Vacuum-Insulated Bag-or-Box): modular cold-chain containers; process data tied to hold-time validation for healthcare and food flows.

Compliance and product safety

Following recent training on PAS 7050 and PRISM product-safety risk assessment, Sanyou London is embedding clearer Product Safety Management Plan controls across manufacturing and supply chain—complementary to the digital quality stack reviewed at the NEC. (These frameworks support safer market placement and faster, evidence-based decisions when changes or corrective actions are needed.)

Takeaways for specifiers, distributors and estates teams

Expect cleaner compliance packs, including inline measurement summaries and batch traceability.
Pilot projects can now include digital dashboards showing installation-relevant metrics (dimensions, mass, λ proxies), easing procurement due diligence.
For multi-site roll-outs, we can mirror settings and quality rules across lines and geographies—reducing variance across lots.

Work with Sanyou London

Spec sheets, samples and pilots: VIW, DVIP, Flexible VIP and VIBB for housing, education, healthcare and commercial estates.
Manufacturing partnerships: equipment vendors, integrators and contract manufacturers aligned to high-mix, high-quality thin-laminate production.
Data & quality: integrations with MES/LIMS/PLM to embed traceability and accelerate approvals.

Contact: www.sanyoulondon.com — Sanyou London Customer Service
Media & speaking enquiries: Professor Saim Memon