"The idea for this project, submitted to the Erasmus+ National Agency in the UK, arose from the fact that there is a lack of qualified personnel in the car body repair sector. Following a report from Boston Consulting Group, ""The European Aftermarket Landscape"", which says that ""the total market volume for the five analysed focus markets (Germany, France, Great Britain, Spain and Poland) is approximately 115 billion euros"", it is easy to understand the target for the impacts of CARBOREP. From that very same report, it is worth mentioning that ""The introduction of new vehicle materials such as aluminium, carbon and UV paint require special tools, instruments and increased training requirements as well. ""Once more, it is clear the need for the ECBRT professional; for a harmonised training solution for all the personnel working in this sector: the European Car Body Repair Technician. The project aimed to resolve the skills mismatch for the employers of companies involved in car body repair processes. CARBOREP has developed a harmonized training course for personnel involved in this activity, designed to satisfy the requirements of both large enterprises and SMEs in different European countries, and creating a European Car Body Repair Technician curriculum, associated training materials and assessment scheme.The consortium consisted of 4 partners. EWF is the European Federation for Welding, Joining and Cutting, with a Training and Qualification network covering 31 member countries that was essential in the implementation and dissemination of the CARBOREP results. The remaining partners were the welding and quality institutes of the UK (TWI), Portugal (ISQ), and Spain (CESOL), which have strong knowledge and expertise in training and qualification at a sector-based level. TWI acted as the Project Coordinator, in direct contact with the National Agency in the UK.The CARBOREP project addressed the lack of specific qualifications and training schemes available for personnel working in the vehicle repair and maintenance industry (specifically for car body repair) in Europe. By creating a high quality curriculum, which features state of the art technologies and manufacturing processes used in car body repair, CARBOREP provides a methodology by which personnel can demonstrate their competence and guarantee the quality of their work and enhance motor vehicle safety. CARBOREP is a harmonised training solution for all personnel working in the car body repair sector and enables local repair workshops and other independent operators to maintain currency with advancing manufacturing techniques and ensure vehicle repair and maintenance routines are performed correctly. This project will have a significant impact across Europe, because it created a professional profile (European Car Body Repair Technician - ECBRT) that covers a specific market need. The project gains even more relevance because the skills and qualification profile development was done at a European level, with a transnational scope, aligned with the European market needs, and then transferred to the national level. This contributes to achieving the European Union's targets and the objectives of the Erasmus+ program of increasing the labour market relevance of VET and reducing skills mismatches and shortages.In addition, and based on the number of companies that work in motor vehicle repair in Europe, there is presently a high need for new VET-content for the training, qualification and certification activities in this field. Common VET-qualifications for personnel working in the car body repair industry, currently offered on a local or national level, are not able to deliver a systematic approach to VET for this occupation. CARBOREP closes this gap and delivers a European qualification standard, improves the quality of the VET-system by incorporating common European tools (e.g. RPL, Learning Outcomes, EQF, ECVET), promoting the transparency, recognition of competences and mutual synergies between I-VET and C-VET. The CARBOREP outputs are designed to boost the skills capital of this sector, important due to its market size, and support an industry-based skills network in order to promote the further need-oriented skills development. CARBOREP fostered the involvement of different stakeholders in making VET more responsive to the needs of the labour market. Having identified the above-mentioned needs, this project created a harmonised training guideline featuring a modular curriculum built with Learning Outcomes, training materials in 3 languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese) and design of the assessment for the trainees. All of these results help mitigate the identified EU market shortfalls."

INFINITY will develop an inorganic alternative to a scarce and high cost material, indium tin oxide (ITO), currently used as a Transparent Conductive Coating (TCC) for display electrodes on glass and plastic substrates. The novel conductive materials to be developed in this project will be based on low cost sol-gel chemistry using more widely available metallic elements and will leverage recent advances in nanostructured coatings. Novel printing procedures will also be developed to enable direct writing of multi and patterned nano-layers, removing the waste associated with etch patterning.

WeldGalaxy project will deliver, a B2B online Platform that brings together global buyers (end-users/OEM) and EU sellers (manufacturers/suppliers/distributors/service providers) of welding equipment along with auxiliaries/consumables and services, thereby enhancing the visibility of EU’s welding products/prototypes/services to global users (via digital marketing strategies) and providing innovative web-based services (e.g. equipment selection and inventory management, digital design/testing of equipment capabilities) to boost EU market share and competitiveness. The digital platform will incorporate Knowledge base engineering (KBE) tool that streamlines equipment selection process for end-users and allows ‘plug and produce’ digital manufacturing of the right equipment to specified customers’/end-users’ requirements and regulatory compliance. Though the full capability of the WeldGalaxy platform including associated product services (including the services from all third parties) will be demonstrated in welding equipment (along with auxiliaries) and consumables manufacturing domain, yet, the conceptual and functional framework of WeldGalaxy technology concept can be used in any industrial domain related to manufacturing. The Dynamic Knowledge Management based B2B platform will be designed by following the standard 3-tier architecture. Scalability and reliability will be assured by the use of: RESTfull architecture for API layer, cloud-based backend platform hosted on mainstream cloud providers like AWS or Google Cloud Platform who offer clustering, loading balancing, caching to support scalability and redundant data backup to ensure reliability. Use of blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) will make the platform inherently stable, highly scalable and always up. The digital platform, supported by integrated blockchain/DLT for improved reliability/visibility/ transparency/ security of transactions, will enhance the competitiveness of EU manufacturing sec