SIAC

Project "Qualification and Renovation: The Portuguese Foundry Industry in the EU"

Project no. POCI-02-0853-FEDER-016245
Operation name | Qualification and Renovation: The Portuguese Foundry Industry in the EU
Start date |01-07-2016
Completion date | 30-06-2018
Total eligible cost |€ 204,599.95
Financial support from the European Union | ERDF – € 173,909.96

The project was presented on October 30, 2015, under AAC no. 04/ SIAC/2015 – Qualification. The project “Qualification and Renovation: The Portuguese Foundry Industry in the EU” seeks to enhance business strategies of SMEs, making them more sophisticated and giving them, innovative positioning strategies which enables them to create competitive advantages.

It calls for the undertaking of a series of actions focused on the strategic goal of providing relevant information to companies in the foundry sector.

Actions to undertake

In a challenging and changing context, especially regarding the European Union, it is important to anticipate political and legislative decisions and trends, insofar as they can be translated into financing opportunities with strong impact and potential for the foundry sector.

THIS PROJECT IS FOCUSED ON:

The impact of relevant policies and legislation:

It is of paramount importance to raise awareness to this issue among entrepreneurs in the sector, as they play an active and relevant role in such decisions, in the least, they shall prepare themselves appropriately for the requirements arising from new legislation.

European financing programmes:

The APF believes it is critical to reinforce the disclosure of the existing programmes among foundry companies, as it may foster their participation and raise awareness regarding upcoming challenges. Furthermore, companies would be able to make their results public, therefore encouraging a more systematic reply to invitations and calls for proposals.This would ultimately give them a bigger capacity to innovate and to pursue a sustainable growth.

Benchmarking:

Adopting the best practices in order to achieve significant efficiency gains and to implement continuous improvements based on highly acknowledged success stories.

Preparing a strategic plan:

This will duly define the sector, pointing out future directions in order to maximise strengths, to eliminate or minimise weaknesses, to value opportunities and to address present or future threats revealed by information regarding the sector’s current status.

Application of the end-of-waste status:

This status regards the positive impact from a proper declassification of waste making it appropriate for reuse as a raw material in other industrial sectors, thus improving process efficiency, as well as environmental sustainability.

In short:

The Project “Qualification and Renovation: The APF in the EU” intends to overcome the current reality, taking on a qualified and innovative character, as well as raising awareness, promoting, cooperating and obtaining information about the sector, increasing productivity and efficiency of SMEs, intensifying activities aimed at progressing in the value chain, and financing areas of sustained and competitive growth.