Deloitte launches smart factory and warehousing facility in Montreal

Deloitte Canada has opened “The Smart Factory @ Montreal,” a facility that showcases more than 20 cutting-edge, efficiency-boosting solutions for manufacturing and warehousing.

Located in the borough of Ville Saint-Laurent and spanning more than 9,000 square feet, Deloitte’s smart factory will demonstrate the possibilities of automation to better run production lines, store and move inventory, and track shipments. The facility’s Industry 4.0 ecosystem leverages technologies including AI, sensors, robotics, IoT, big data, and cloud.

Supported by solutions from partners such as Siemens, Cisco, and SAP, the smart factory’s use cases include smart receiving, augmented reality picking, and autonomous pallet handling.

Deloitte expects to showcase the advanced facility to hundreds of national and global business leaders. The facility has collaboration agreements with Centre d’expertise industrielle de Québec (CEI) and with PME MTL Centre Ouest to support local companies, and plans to work with local universities to help pilot new innovations by students and researchers.

The Montreal facility joins a network of Deloitte smart factories in Wichita, US; Dusseldorf, Germany; and Kyoto, Japan.

“As Canada’s largest professional services firm, we care about the future of the country,” said Anthony Viel, chief executive officer of Deloitte Canada. “We believe that projects like this will fundamentally transform our economy - and society - and set Canada on a better path.”

Canada’s workforce is less productive than the US, Eurozone average, the UK, and Australia, and is expected to be the worst performing economy out of 38 advanced countries in the next 40 years, according to the OECD. The country’s poor outlook for GDP growth is heavily influenced by an inability to boost labor productivity.

Canadian workers are less productive than most of the developed world because, on average, Canadian companies use less capital and technology, are less innovative, and operate at a smaller scale.

“Canadian businesses tend to be sized for the Canadian market but are often competing against multinationals that have extensive resources and sophisticated systems,” said Alan Taliaferro, Deloitte partner and leader, The Smart Factory @ Montreal. “This space provides an opportunity to support Canadian businesses by enabling them to learn about, and experiment with, an array of live smart technologies in a fully automated factory and warehouse.”