RISE offers the action research service that addresses municipalities, regions, construction operators, real estate companies and others who are engaged in community development projects and who are facing complex challenges. The goal is to deepen the ability to control and coordinate a social process that leads to sustainable development.

Through action research (ongoing evaluation), RISE wants to contribute as qualitative support that improves an organization's efficiency, innovativeness and capacity for change.

The action researcher contributes learning and development for a project's organization, governance, implementation and follow-up. The action researcher acts proactively by anticipating future situations, for example when a project risks not reaching its sustainability goals. In such a case, the task of the action researcher may be to create space for preventive measures by assisting with support for a management and organizational change within the framework of, for example, a sustainability program or an action plan. The action researcher can identify synergies and goal conflicts and raise these to project management.

Action Research's services include:

Competence

The role of the action researcher is partly to function as a guide within process control and various specialist areas, and partly to be able to make evidence-based, qualitative analyzes and assessments. We who are engaged in action research represent a broad field of knowledge and network that ranges from relevant specialist expertise to research-based competence. RISE's work is based on Swedish environmental quality goals, gender equality and public health policy goals and Agenda 2030.

Performance goals

The goal of action research is to contribute with the following effects:

• Organizational culture – systematized control of management and collaboration functions that support an inclusive and efficient social process in the planning, implementation and management stage, whose experiences can be brought back as qualitative support in future projects
• Innovation-driven development – support of new solutions for a project's local challenges dependent on economic, social, cultural and environmental factors
• Sustainable society – prerequisites for the planning, implementation and follow-up of the project's set sustainability goals to be realized, which contribute to an accessible and inclusive living environment that is resilient over time.

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has evolved from prototyping into a industrial production method that is reshaping products and supply chains for companies across all industries. With AM, you can enable demand-driven, sustainable, resilient, and localized production.

However, the big question has been: How do you quantify the business value of AM?

Companies and organizations face increasing demands for cost efficiency, shorter lead times, improved sustainability, and resilience.

At the same time, they need to manage:

• Complex logistics and disturbances
• Fluctuating demand
• Parts availability
• Transition from traditional processes

Finding a tangible and realistic AM business case is essential to drive the transition towards greater sustainability, resilience, and competitiveness. However, identifying suitable components for AM without a clear business perspective and automated tools is both difficult and time-consuming.

To identify which components are suitable for AM, both technical and business selection criteria need to be applied. At RISE, we have developed proven automation tools and methods, and continue to advance them, to describe any supply chain, compare it with one of five different AM-enabled supply chain scenarios, and quantify its business value based on the following three parameters:
• Cost 
• Lead time 
• Sustainability

The proven and tested method and tools enables you to:

• Automatically scan your complete spare part catalog (1-150000) to identify spare parts suitable for 3D-printing
• Analyze the entire supply chain and calculate cost, lead time and CO2 emissions
• Quantify business value and sustainability gains with AM
• Build scenarios for future production – from centralized to local printing
• Establish road maps and strategies to drive the transition. 

Our methodology and tools provides clear decision support based on time, cost, and environmental impact.

How it works

Together with you, we will:

1. Build cross-functional team and share knowledge based on latest research
2. Identify parts with AM potential
3. Analyze the supply chain
4. Calculate business cases and sustainability benefits
5. Provide recommendations and next steps

You will receive a dedicated business case including:

• Automated analysis of your entire spare parts catalog (1–150,000 items)
• 1–5 selected components (or component groups) with AM potential
• Simulated scenarios for regional or local 3D-printing
• Clear calculations of lead time, cost, and sustainability savings
• Concrete recommendations for next steps to drive the transition

3-6-12 months

Technology development moves forward at a rapid pace and can create opportunities to predict maintenance needs and thereby reduce the risk of costly breakdowns. But what development of the maintenance organization is required to take full advantage of the technology and save time and costs? Let RISE help with your Smart Maintenance strategy. 

We want to support (manufacturing) companies that wants to develop their maintenance organization according to digitalization of manufacturing industry. This service is primarily aimed at you as a leader of a maintenance organisation, as well as your employees. We offer inspiration and coaching to get a common picture of your current situation and possible areas of improvement. You will also get supported in making an action plan based on strategic priorities. If necessary, RISE can also support you and your organisation trough the implementation based on the action plan.

We work according to a research based framework - a practically applicable guide to working structured with Smart Maintenance strategy. The first step is to identify your current situation (1), which is followed by setting goals (2) and a priority (3) around areas for improvement, based on your current situation and your potential. Next, we identify key activities (4) and create a concrete action plan, including an overview of your strengths and possible obstacles in realizing the action plan (5). We also make up a plan for how your activities and their effects are to be followed up (6). In practical terms, the work is based on 1-2 workshops and the results are compiled in a digital report that we go trough together.

• Information and inspiration about Smart Maintenance implementation. 
• Common picture of the maintenance organization's current situation and potential for improvement. 
• A concrete action plan with prioritized areas based on your goals. 
• Support to set up a plan for follow-up. 
• If necessary, support in realization of the action plan with the help of RISE's collective expertise.

Enligt överenskommelse. 

From 30 000 SEK. 

How will your business and your relationships with customers and suppliers be affected when digital product passports are introduced in your sector and for your products? We help you acquire the latest facts about requirements for your particular product in your role in your company's value network. Based on we offer an interactive learning case.

The purpose of our offer is to give competences and responsible roles in your company the opportunity to work together to build the competence and organization that will be required when digital product passports become a reality.

Background and context: In December 2019, the European Green Deal (COM (2019) 640 final) addressed "... an electronic product passport could provide information on a product's origin, composition, repair and disassembly options and end-of-life management...".

That in March 2020 saw the publication of the document European Action Plan for a Circular Economy (CEAP) (COM(2020) 98 final) which requires the single market to "... mobilize the potential for digitization of product information, including solutions such as digital passports".

Our offer addresses and prepares your company for this demand for digitization and sharing of product information in a simple and practical way.

We will contact you to gain an understanding of your business and your products. We then design a suitable interactive role-playing situation, where your employees can try to introduce and collaborate within the framework of a digital product pass that affects you.

During the interactive role-play, you develop a plan together for how you will work when the demands come, and how you within the company will organize yourself most effectively to meet these demands. This will be your action plan to continue working with in your management team.

The planning time depends on the complexity of your company, and the actual interactive execution is typically one and a half working days.

It is essential that the company is willing to share product and value chain information during the preparation for the interactive part. RISE and the company enter into a confidentiality agreement before this stage.

A circular transition requires changes in user behaviours. But acting in a circular way is challenging; it can be more cumbersome, more time-consuming, and sometimes more expensive compared to the linear alternatives. We can help you design offers that both enable circular use patterns and make them preferable!

Today, many people lack preconditions to change their personal life and work life to meet society's sustainability goals and align to strategies for a circular economy. Without changed conditions, it will be difficult for the majority to stop buying newly produced goods and instead start buying, renting, or borrowing things in circular flows and re-circulate them when the time comes. By better understanding users' everyday lives, their circularity-related behaviours, as well as their needs and experience of today's products and services, you will be able to create new circular offerings that enable a circular personal life and work life for more people. Circular offerings based on customer needs also have the potential to both become more attractive than today's linear offerings and contribute to reduced environmental impact. Through this service, RISE helps you explore opportunities for circular offerings with user needs and behaviours in focus.

The service is suitable for companies and organizations that currently develop, renovate, or resell products that can provide clear economic and sustainability benefits if they are circulated in tight loops. Perhaps you offer a product that has a long lifespan without getting paid for the value the product creates over time? Or perhaps you offer a product with a short lifespan that could be redesigned to last longer and be used by more people? Regardless, we can help you explore opportunities for new attractive offers that facilitate circular use patterns.

The service is adaptable to your situation. At a first meeting, we talk about your needs, existing customer offerings and challenges. RISE then proposes appropriate activities, which may include, for example:

• Inspiring lectures on the topic of user-centered circular design.
• Workshops to create an understanding of the customer's situation and/or develop design concepts.
• Design sprint where we work through a business opportunity from needs analysis to design solution and business case.
• User studies that build deeper understanding of the users' situation before workshops or design sprints.

During the activities, RISE introduces concrete and inspiring methods and tools that help you design for circular use patterns with your customers' needs in focus. These help you map processes and customer journeys, explore how users experience circular consumption and reusing products, create concepts based on circular design strategies, and evaluate circular business opportunities.

You will gain a basic understanding of user-centered circular design and how knowledge of the user's personal life or work life can help you develop successful solutions for a circular economy. You will also gain knowledge about how you can work to develop new user-centered circular solutions and what design tools you can use in your process. Depending on the activities carried out, the delivery may also include:

• Insights about user experiences and user needs.
• Ideas and concepts for user-centered circular solutions.
• Business cases for your circular offerings.

Insights and other results can also be compiled by RISE by agreement, for example in a presentation, report or summarised in inspirational scenarios and design fictions or similar. 

The need for preparation varies depending on the activities; we jointly agree on how you can best prepare.

Concrete Technology combines multidisciplinary knowledge from inorganic chemistry (binders), organic chemistry (additives) and geology (aggregate) providing the most used building material in the world. RRISE offerst services within design of climate optimized concrete, advanced testing and consulting for applications in engineering structures.

The primary challenge of the concrete industry worldwide and in Sweden is the climate transition to carbon-neutral production, resource efficiency, and extending of materials' life. Multiple new raw materials are being developed to be applied in concrete, but their compatibility and practical features concerning large-scale production are necessary to secure their success. Properties of concrete at the early stage including rheology, setting time, and strength development, but also temperature and load-dependent properties at the early stage are crucial for the final structure quality.

Offer includes support with the development and application of climate-improved concrete with alternative binders, recycled aggregate, and new additives (accelerators, water reduction, shrinkage reduction, etc.) through test mixes at our concrete station (mixers between 10 and 300 L).

RISE concrete testing lab in Borås offers almost all types of performance testing from strength (pressure, bending, cracking), resistance (chloride, frost, sulfite), advanced methods for fresh properties (rheometer, curing time with ultrasound, etc.), shrinkage (plastic, autogenous and dehydration).

The offer is complemented by expertise in construction technology with relevant standards (structural calculations, FEA modeling) and execution of concrete structures that may include alternative types of reinforcement, fiber, thermal treatment or analysis of massive structures.

We also offer the development of special materials such as foam concrete (thermal and sound insulation), high-performance concrete or photocatalytic surfaces, and concrete with nanoparticles.

Concrete receipts, reports from testing, consulting services (also at clients' premisses), and innovation partnership.

Do you need to rally around a vision, take the next step in a project, solve a complex challenge, or shake things up to gain new perspectives? At RISE, we have extensive experience in designing and leading processes, workshops, and events that create engagement, participation, and concrete results.

We facilitate everything from individual workshops to longer processes – always with a focus on innovation and future-proof operations. This may involve getting started, changing direction, shaping new concepts, increasing the sense of community at work, or strengthening the ability to innovate. Regardless of the purpose, we build each program based on your needs and goals. 

Facilitation can be combined with one of our lectures. 

Here are some examples of formats: 

• Tailor-made workshops and innovation sprints 

• Process management in change or development work (e.g., using the F4 methodology, Innovation Capacity for the Future) 

• Moderation of conferences and events with a focus on innovation management

We combine scientifically based methods with creative energy and solid experience. Our efforts are work opportunities where we move forward together on a specific issue. We guide you through a designed process where all participants are activated, involved, and contribute.

An experience. A task. A result. 

You gain consensus, commitment, momentum with new insights, perspectives, and energy for the next step. 

RISE has expertise in both cameras and computer vision, which can be used in industrial applications for automating quality inspection and process monitoring.

Visual quality inspection is an essential step in many manufacturing processes, which, if done manually, is often a time-consuming and tiring task with inconsistent performance. While automation through implementation of conventional computer vision systems is sometimes possible, variations in size, shape, and location of the defects is usually too difficult for these systems to handle due to their hand-crafted and rigid detection rules.

Visual process monitoring, such as continuous tracking or positioning of products moving on a conveyor, is associated with similar challenges.

However, with AI-based computer vision, where smart algorithms learn by themselves through training on large image or video datasets, automation of these tasks can now be achieved in a rapidly increasing number of cases.      

Our computer vision service offer consists of four steps, where step 1 and 2 are free of charge: 

1. Initial meeting: Introduction and a general overview of your company's needs and level of preparedness with respect to adoption of a computer vision solution.

2. Factory visit: RISE visits your factory to gain a first-hand understanding of your operational environment. This visit can optionally be combined with the initial meeting (step 1).

   After the visit, RISE will make an assessment of the complexity of your use case and come back to you with a suggestion of how to proceed. For very complex cases, we might suggest initiating a research project, led by RISE, in collaboration with your team and additional partners.

3. Workshop (Price: depends on agreed upon duration): We meet for a detailed discussion to produce 

• a problem and requirements specification:
  • outlining the types of defects/events that the vision system should be able to detect
  • prioritizing the defects/events
  • establishing the minimum performance criteria for the vision system
  • determining how to create an effective inspection/monitoring setup (e.g., whether there is a need for robots, dedicated lighting etc.)
• a data readiness analysis:
  • assessing whether your company is currently collecting data relevant to the computer vision task
  • evaluating how easily the existing data can be accessed and utilized
  • analyzing the quality of the current data to ensure its suitability for the project
  • determining whether there is a requirement for additional data, such as synthetic data 

The outcome of steps 1-3 will form the basis of an detailed implementation plan. In step 4 of our service we carry out this plan, which of course can be broken down into smaller parts (sprints) with clearly defined milestones, to reduce financial risk. 

4. Training and implementation of AI-based computer vision (Price: per agreement, Duration: per agreement): We implement machine vision solutions for defect detection or process monitoring by training state-of-the-art AI algorithms on image or video data partly or entirely collected from your process. A critical aspect of this training involves data labeling, a task that we undertake with input from your company's experts to ensure accurate categorization of, e.g., defects. 

   Note: in this step we also include cases where there already is a vision system installed, but where performance improvements are needed. As an independent research institute, our expertise is not limited to any specific system or software, allowing us the flexibility to work with a variety of platforms and technologies.      

What we can deliver:   

• A data readiness analysis that prepares you for implementation of computer vision
• Implementation of computer vision solutions in your production
• Improvements to existing solutions

Depending on work scope.

As an organization, it can be difficult to know whether you are making better or worse choices in the green transition. What is a more sustainable alternative? We can help you by categorizing chemicals and materials based on their impact on the sustainability goal: non-toxic environment.

Avoid the pitfalls of choosing hazardous alternatives

There are several reforms underway within the EU's Green Deal to speed up a fair transition to a climate-neutral, circular economy whilte protecting biodiversity and reach a non-toxic environment. Part of the transition means that we need to look for alternative ways to produce and manufacture chemicals, materials, and goods - but how do we know if we are choosing genuinely better alternatives?

How can we help you?

We can help you by obtaining data and categorizing the hazard of chemicals from "Avoid" to "Safer". We use the EU's criteria for safe and sustainable design, which are under development within the EU's chemicals strategy for sustainability (2020). You can use the data and guidance to understand trade offs and risks for alternatives - before it's too late. Our method for chemical safety can be combined with life cycle analysis to also understand climate impact of different choices.

Alternatives assessment - A method for scientifically comparing alternatives

We use the Alternatives Assessment method developed to manage "regrettable substitution". Regrettable substitution means choosing an alternative which is as hazardous as the chemical/material you want to replace. A well-known example is bisphenol A, a common plastic chemical with endocrine-disrupting properties. 

The most common substitute for Bisphenol A is Bisphenol S. A chemical that can also cause endocrine disruption. Another example of regrettable substitution is when a substitution transfers the risk to another part of the life cycle. For example a chemical is substituted to protect consumers, but introduces an unacceptable risk for occuptiontal health instead. To avoid this risk, we assess alternatives for many health hazards.

How do we compare chemicals?

We use criteria from the EU's current version of the "Safe and sustainable by design" framework" (SSbD) (2022). The method involves collecting information on legislation, hazard classifications according to CLP and voluntary Substitution Lists. We also make sure to check for data gaps on hazard. Lack of data can give a first impression that an alternative is safe. But no data does not mean an alternative is safe, just that it needs more testing. 

We can adapt the assessment depending on your need and budget. We suggest that we start by screening each chemical for legislation, two voluntary restriction lists and approximately 20 hazard classifications. 

Extend the sustainability scope

Do you want to include other important aspects for your green transition? Alternatives assessment is a method to compare and choose safer alternatives while including function, climate, and economy. We have colleagues that know life cycle analysis, materials, technoeconomy, circular economy, etc. We can involve them in the assessment and tailor it to your needs.

The basis for making informed decisions

You will receive a summary in an Excel sheet based on the agreement. Listed below are examples of what type of information the summary can contain. The delivery comes with a walk-through of the documentation and guidance going forward. We can also prepare presentation material if necessary.

The chemical with associated CAS number is categorized according to the EU's SSbD criteria (2022 v.1):

• Cut-off criteria: Most harmful substance, corresponds to Particularly hazardous substances (SVHC). These substances cannot be considered safe and should be phased out as much as possible.
• Safety level 1: Substances of concern, substances with serious properties that should be replaced by safer alternatives.
• Safety level 2: Other hazard classes, substances with "less potent" hazard classifications. The risk can be managed through exposure. 
• Safety level 3: Safer alternatives

Examples of legislation or restricted lists:

• EU REACH regulation
• POPs Regulation
• Chemsec SIN list
• The Swedish Chemicals Agency's PRIO - a tool for substitution

Data gap

• Flag if the substance is not registered according to REACH
• Flag if REACH dossier lacks important data for cut-off criteria/most harmful substances and may be a regrettable substitute.
• Opportunities to follow-up with data modeling to fill data gaps.
• Opportunities to follow-up with in-depth literature study.
• Opportunities to follow-up with toxicity tests. 

• For chemicals, we need identification names or numbers such as CAS number, EC number, InChi, SMILES, etc.
• Associated Chemical Safety Data Sheets (SDS) if available.
• For materials: A composition list with information on chemical content including identification names or numbers. 

Through a collaborative work process where people with different areas of expertize work together to improve handling and analysis of your sustainability data, new insights are gained on what your sustainability data really contains.

Requirements on sustainability reporting are increasing. The EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) brings a need for improved handling and improved analysis of sustainability data in order to improve quality of sustainability reporting. 

By assembling a team of people with different areas of expertize, from your organization and from ours, to work in a collaborative work process, in a defined number of iterations, new insights on your sustainability data will be created. E.g. better visualization brings understanding on what areas can be improved, higher granularity of categorization brings better quality to the sustainability reporting and an improved sustainability data modeling/ structuring brings insights on potentially missing data. 

Improved quality of sustainability data brings improved sustainability reporting, but even more important; improved insights on what areas has most room for improvement. 

We offer a collaborative work process in which we mix people with different expertize areas from your organazation as well as ours. This team works together to improve handling and analysis of your sustainability data.

We deliver on your needs identified in the tender.