Nexelem at Smart Factory Week 2026: Come and Meet Us in Birmingham

Two days in Birmingham. You will leave with answers to questions you didn’t know you had, valuable contacts, and at least one idea to implement immediately. Smart Factory Week 2026 is returning to the NEC Birmingham on 3–4 June, and the Nexelem team will be there.

This year’s edition is set to be the biggest yet. Thousands of manufacturers, engineers, and technology specialists will descend on Hall 5 for two days of hands-on content, live demonstrations, and peer-to-peer conversations that simply cannot be replicated in a webinar.

Let’s meet at Smart Factory Week

If you are heading to Birmingham, let’s find half an hour.

It doesn’t matter where you are in the process — whether you’re seeking an early evaluation, trying to resolve a scheduling issue, or simply curious about what others are doing. Get in touch before the event and we’ll sort something out.

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The more specific your challenge, the more useful the conversation tends to be. We are not there to pitch — we are there to think through problems with people who have real ones.

What Smart Factory Week actually is (and why it matters)

Smart Factory Week is the UK’s largest festival of advanced manufacturing and engineering. It brings together six co-located events under one roof: Smart Factory Expo, MAINTEC, Design + Engineering Expo, Drives + Controls, the Manufacturing Digitalization Summit, and the new Factory of the Future showcase. Researched and produced by The Manufacturer, the event is not a generic trade show. Every content session is selected for practical relevance, not promotional value.

If you work in production management, scheduling, or operational improvement, it is two of the most concentrated days on the UK manufacturing calendar.

What’s on the agenda in 2026

The 2026 program covers robotics and automation, maintenance strategy, engineering design, and the question most manufacturers are still working through: how to actually build data-driven operations, not just talk about them.

A few things worth knowing before you go:

Smart Factory Expo is the heartbeat of the week — dozens of software and hardware vendors demonstrating live integrations, real-time production data, and the kind of shop-floor connectivity that turns an MES into a genuine decision-support tool rather than a glorified spreadsheet.

MAINTEC tackles predictive maintenance, asset management, and reliability engineering. Given that unplanned downtime still costs European manufacturers an estimated €864 billion per year (according to Siemens research), the numbers make it hard to treat as secondary.

The Manufacturing Digitalization Summit runs as a closed-door event alongside the main floor — senior leaders only, focused on strategic questions rather than vendor demos.

The exhibition opens at 09:30 each day (VIP entry from 09:00), with a drinks reception on the Wednesday evening from 16:30 — which, if past years are anything to go by, is where some of the most useful conversations actually happen.

Why the Nexelem team is attending

We build production management software — specifically, an integrated suite covering Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS), Manufacturing Execution (MES), and Industrial IoT (IIoT) — and events like Smart Factory Week are where we stay honest.

— What does it mean?

Staying honest means listening.

It means walking the floor, sitting in the content sessions, and paying close attention to what production managers and planners are actually struggling with in 2026 in the UK, not what we assume they are struggling with from behind our monitors. The gap between vendor assumptions and factory realities is one of the most predictable sources of software that nobody uses.

It also means connecting with people who are thinking hard about the same problems we are: how to make production schedules that survive contact with reality, how to close the loop between planning and execution, and how to turn shop-floor data into something genuinely actionable rather than just a dashboard that someone glances at once a week.

Let’s connect during the upcoming production festival.