Manufacturing & Engineering Week gets Smart for 2024
Manufacturing & Engineering Week has been renamed Smart Manufacturing & Engineering Week for the 2024 event, which takes place at the NEC in June. The show’s organiser, Nineteen Group, says the change reflects the forward-looking nature of the event and focus on the new technologies driving the sector forward.
“The week is all about cutting-edge innovations in hardware and software and solutions to the current challenges being faced around industry 4.0, sustainability and supply chain shortages, to name a few,” explains the event’s marketing director, Verity Noon. “Manufacturers and engineers are constantly looking for ways to work smarter, to become more efficient, stay ahead of the competitive curve and explore new business models and practices and Smart Manufacturing & Engineering Week will help them do just that.”
This will be the first year that the Drives & Controls show and its sister exhibitions, Air-Tech and Fluid Power & Systems (all previously owned by DFA Media), will be fully-fledged parts of the event, taking place in their own hall. They will run for three days (4–6 June), while the other exhibitions – Design & Engineering Expo, Smart Factory Expo and Maintec – will run for two days (5–6 June) next door. Together, the events are expected to attract “way beyond 450 exhibitors”.
“Drives & Controls is one of the great brand names in the UK industrial exhibitions sector,” says its director, Laura Parris. “It has such a long history from the days when it overflowed from its original home in Telford to now where it finds its natural place as part of Smart Manufacturing & Engineering Week.”
Other live events taking place during the Smart Manufacturing & Engineering Week will include: the Manufacturing Digitalisation Summit; the Director’s Forum; and the Industrial Data Summit; and the Manufacturing Automation and Robotics Summit. The Manufacturer Top 100 Award ceremony will also take place during the week.
“In 2023, we gave our team licence to put on an event which was different to how industrial exhibitions and conferences had been staged in the past,” comments Nineteen Group CEO, Peter Jones. “The festival feeling which they created will be built on in 2024 and the addition of Drives & Controls in Hall 5 means we must think even bigger as there are just simply more people to engage and entertain.”
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