Virtual Manufacturing: Accelerating heavy industry’s green transition

As heavy industry in the UK and Sweden races to decarbonise, the focus is shifting from pilots to scalable, commercially viable solutions. In this Q&A, we asked Richard Gould, Managing Director at Virtual Manufacturing UK, where he sees the biggest near-term opportunities to cut emissions – and what needs to change across technology, regulation and value chains to unlock full-scale roll-out.

Across your UK and Swedish operations, where do you see the biggest near-term opportunities to cut emissions, and which technologies are you prioritising to deliver them at scale?
In Sweden, where the grid is already largely clean, the focus is process optimisation; in the UK, where decarbonisation pressure is more acute, data-driven decision making is helping manufacturers build the confidence to move beyond small-scale pilots. Across both markets, visibility is the critical first step – you can’t reduce what you can’t measure. Granular energy monitoring at machine and workstation level consistently surfaces inefficiencies that would otherwise go unnoticed, making existing facilities smarter before capital is committed to replacing them.

For heavy industry’s green transition, what needs to work differently between the UK and Sweden – from regulation to customers and suppliers – to move more projects from pilots to full commercial roll-out?
Sweden benefits from long-standing industrial-government alignment and a culture of incremental improvement that makes scaling pilots more natural. The UK presents a more complex landscape – fragmented regulation, longer procurement cycles, and greater financial pressure on capital projects all make the path from pilot to full roll-out genuinely harder. Bridging that gap requires both the digital tools to build visibility and the cross-market experience to know what good looks like – and for most manufacturers, the confidence to commit comes from seeing comparable operations move first, not from the technology alone.