TNO is an independent research organization who connects people and knowledge to create innovations that boost the sustainable competitive strength of industry and well-being of society. TNO focuses on nine themes, two of them being ICT and Industry who jointly cooperate in the Smart Industry program. This program aims to execute the Dutch Smart Industry Agenda in order to support manufacturing organizations embrace Industry 4.0 concepts. Mike de Roode is a Scientist Integrator at the Data Science department of TNO and is working on semantic interoperability solutions as part of the Smart Industry agenda.

An example project Mike is working on is the Fieldlab Smart Connected Supplier Network (SCSN), a collaboration between small and large manufacturing organizations, software vendors/integrators, and sector organizations. The goal of the SCSN project is to better integrate the manufacturing organizations in complex dynamic supply chain collaborations in such a way that they can optimally exchange order-, logistical- and production process measurement-data. This solution supports the complex environment of the high-tech equipment manufacturing Industry in the Brainport region and should work both for large enterprises, as for small SME’s which do not have the resources for extensive IT integration efforts. Nowadays, SCSN is implemented by almost all relevant software vendors so manufacturing organizations can use the standard to communicate with a large network of suppliers and customers, both national as international.