Production matters: VTT in global trends

Finnish industry primarily manufactures various investment goods for companies and individual consumers. High-quality products have been successfully developed for what are often very narrow niche markets. In today's rapidly globalising world, however, companies are facing full-scale competition in all markets. To deal with these challenges, industry now needs new knowledge and know-how more than ever. This change has been brought about by the general digitalisation of both products and production processes. Digitalisation requires continuous competence development among company personnel. To acquire new knowledge to meet industry's current and future needs, VTT researchers must provide the utmost efficiency in the research and development of manufacturing methods, production processes and corporate networks. Major challenges facing manufacturing industry include the transition from resource-oriented production to knowledge-oriented production, and that from goods-oriented logic to service-oriented logic. VTT moves with the times and contributes to finding solutions to industry's problems. This report describes VTT's research results. These will help manufacturing industry to deal with the above challenges.