HE Mr. Abdulla bin Adel Fakhro, Minister of Industry and Commerce, announced the launch of (iFactories) as a national initiative to support the movement of the industrial sector towards the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" by evaluating factories and measuring their level of digital maturity, and enabling them to invest in technology infrastructure and manufacturing automation, which is one of the pillars of the industrial sector's strategy (2022-2026), in partnership with the Labor Fund (Tamkeen), and in the presence of representatives of the industrial sector and Ministry officials.

Mr. Abdulla bin Adel Fakhro valued the government's keen interest in developing the industrial sector to strengthen national industries and increase their efficiency and global competitiveness.

His Excellency also added that the launch of this initiative, in strategic partnership with (Tamkeen), aims to transform 300 factories into smart factories by the year 2026, by adopting the best regional and global practices in managing production lines to ensure the sustainability of the industrial sector's resources, raise its productivity, increase its efficiency, and reduce dependence on unskilled manpower, and transfer them towards automation and modern technologies, in order to create promising qualitative job opportunities for citizens.
 

For her part, Tamkeen CEO. Maha Mufeez confirmed that this partnership achieves Tamkeen's goals in making the private sector the main engine of economic growth in the Kingdom of Bahrain, in addition to making Bahrainis the ideal choice for employment in the labor market.

Mufeez also explained that Tamkeen's role in this initiative is to be a competitive accelerator that aims to finance automation and digitization projects through financial grants of up to 50% to factories that seek to adopt the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in addition to qualifying and training 20 Bahrainis to obtain accreditation from “Insight", making them the first batch of globally accredited evaluators to measure factories' readiness for digital transformation and assess their digital maturity.
 

During the event, Dr. Khaled Fahad Al Alawi gave a brief presentation on the basis of (ifactories), indicating that it will be based on the (SIRI) index, the latest international standard for evaluating factories in terms of applying the practices and tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Al-Alawi pointed out that the factory transformation process is summarized in 4 steps, starting with the evaluation stage, where the Ministry will provide advisory and technical support to conduct self-evaluation, followed by the actual evaluation by accredited evaluators, which will move the factory to the design stage, to develop a digital transformation plan, which is considered the basis for the empowerment stage. Through which the factory will be able to obtain support and incentives, ending with the development phase, where the Ministry will, through its tools, monitor the transformation process through performance monitoring tools and measure its indicators.

Al-Alawi invited those wishing to join the initiative to start self-assessment by viewing the evaluation guide on the Ministry's website, or by communicating directly with specialists in Industrial affairs in the Ministry to benefit from the initiative.