Flexman Project

The Spanish Rapid Manufacturing Association (ASERM) leads the FLEXMAN Project (Flexible and Virtual Manufacturing), which is found within the framework of the Consolidation and Competitiveness Plan of Small and Medium Enterprises of supraregional nature and in which also participate other sectorial associations, technological centres, universities and SMEs. This project started in June 2005 and will last until October 2006.

The project’s objective is to increase the competitiveness of SMEs involved in the development chain of components and capital goods through the use of rapid manufacturing technologies, directly from electronic information, be it prototypes, tooling, pre-series or medium-volume series (<10.000 parts).

The need for the project comes from the fact detected by the ASERM members of the under-use in SMEs of Rapid Manufacturing technologies.

Therefore, the result that we expect to obtain from this project is the implementation of such technologies in at least 50 SMEs of the Plastic and Metal sectors, in a wide area of the national territory. The benefits obtained from this implementation by the participating companies will be the following: the drastic reduction of Time-to-Market, reducing time, costs and risks associated to the design and development processes, a better validation of design and process FMEAs, the increase of adaptation capacity to the market, being able to set trends and fashions, and above all, the increase of competitiveness and market share of such SMEs.