Mike Russell of AUAS is the leader of Work Package 3 for DIGIFABS. We recently spoke to Mike about his role leading this part of the project, what that role entails, and how that impacts the success of the project.
Can you please outline your role in the DIGIFABS project?
As AUAS project lead, my primary role was to orchestrate the contributions of 14 consortium partners throughout the Investigation phase. This proved challenging as project-related milestones and deadlines often overlapped with partners’ running obligations within their own organisations.
How was this phase of DIGIFABS managed?
The project-related activities were managed within AUAS’s Teams environment which, in addition to serving as a repository for meeting minutes and planning discussions, also served as a staging area for work-in-progress outputs prior to them being provided to consortium partners for review.
To ensure process and deliverable consistency across contributing consortium partners, a series of ‘How to…” guides was created detailing how, for example, to conduct the literature review, or SME interviews. The overall methodology was set up in a methodology pack at the commencement of WP3. This methodology was iteratively tuned as the project advanced reflecting evolving insights, constraints, and opportunities as they presented themselves.
What were the key outputs from the Investigation phase of the project?
As well as the internal documents we prepared to support Partners’ work on this Work Package we published several key outputs. On completing the investigation phase of the project we published:
- DigiFABS – Training Program Analysis in the F&B Sector: This output gathers insights in the form of a mini-case collection analysing 24 SME’s successful digitalization efforts through training programmes within the F&B sector
- DigiFABS – Student Skill Gap Analysis: This output outlines the findings of a skill gap analysis, highlighting the critical areas where digital skills and competencies need to be developed further through comparative analysis of the skills presumably possessed by students and the level of importance of those skills as perceived by industry experts and academia.
- DigiFABS – Synthesis of Literature and Interviews: This output synthesises review literature (skill concepts and digital transformation maturity models) and synthesises interviews with SMEs and educators/trainers active in the F&B sector.
What impact do these key outputs have on the overall project?
In their totality, these outputs resulting from the Investigation phases, and the results and insights they contain, form the basis for conceptualising, designing, and delivering WP4 – The Summer School and Challenge, and WP 5 RDCCA Bootcamps to prepare Educators and SMEs for the ‘SME goes Digital Challenge’.
The international Summer School will be held in September 2025. It targets a mixed group of 20 students per HEI with equal representation from the engineering (e.g., IT, process management, etc.), business (e.g. business administration, marketing, innovation management, etc.) and nutritional sciences fields (e.g. food chemistry, ecotrophology, etc.) and recruitment for that will start shortly.
The boot camps are split into the Educator’s boot camp and the SME boot camp. They will take place as short international online sessions in a suitable setting for the target groups.
Visit our results page to download all the results from the Investigation phase.
