Made Smarter East Midlands: Funding Software and Automation for Manufacturers

What is Made Smarter East Midlands?

Made Smarter is the UK programme for helping manufacturing SMEs adopt digital technology. In our region it is delivered through the East Midlands Growth Hub, which the East Midlands Combined County Authority (EMCCA) runs as the single front door for business support across Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire (EMCCA Growth Hub, 2026).

What the East Midlands scheme has offered, according to the Growth Hub and the Leicester and Leicestershire Enterprise Partnership:

• A matched grant of up to £20,000 towards digital technology projects. "Matched" means the business pays a share of the project and the grant pays the rest, up to the cap. The exact intervention rate was not confirmed in our research.
• Fully funded specialist advice: a digital adviser works through your processes with you before any money is spent on tools (East Midlands Growth Hub, 2026).
• A programme end date of March 2026, with an extension to 2029 anticipated at the time of writing.

We are software developers, not grant administrators, so treat this post as a map rather than an application form. The Growth Hub will confirm what is open the week you call.

What does "adopting digital technology" actually look like for a manufacturer?

Grant language talks about "digital tools". On the shop floor and in the office, it tends to mean one of these:

• Quoting and order intake. For Webro, a cable and connector supplier, customers emailed purchase orders with hundreds of lines in their own part numbers. We built an AI agent that reads the PDF, matches each line to Webro's product and prepares the quote for a human to approve. Up to 48 hours of work became around two minutes, delivered in three weeks. Read the Webro case study.
• Stock, job costing and scheduling. The spreadsheet that has become a system. A phased bespoke build puts quoting live first, then stock, then costing, so staff see benefit in weeks rather than months. See ERP development.
• Customer and trade portals. Ultrabond Adhesives' site gives trade customers their own login for repeat ordering; AB Components in Ilkeston has a 6,000-product store searchable by product and manufacturer code. Ultrabond · AB Components.
• CRM for a sales team that quotes from drawings. Retailer or designer accounts, quotes from a spec, order status without a phone call. See CRM development.
• Data you can actually see. Dashboards that pull from the systems above, so the Monday meeting starts with numbers rather than guesses.

Whether a specific project qualifies is the adviser's call, not ours. Schemes like this generally favour projects that change how the business operates over a new brochure website.

Who is this funding for, and why Derby and Long Eaton in particular?

The eligibility basics have been: an SME, manufacturing as the core activity, and based in the Growth Hub's area. The local numbers explain why the East Midlands has its own programme.

Long Eaton and Erewash. Erewash borough has 3,690 VAT or PAYE-registered enterprises, and 355 of them are manufacturers: 9.6%, the highest manufacturing share of Nottingham, Derby, Leicester or Erewash (ONS UK Business Counts via Nomis, March 2026). Long Eaton was established as the UK Centre of Quality Upholstery Manufacture in 2014, has more makers of high-quality upholstery than any other UK town, and hosts the Long Point trade show every spring and autumn (Furniture News, January 2026). An upholsterer might run retailer orders by email, fabric from several suppliers, frames in-house and deliveries on its own vans. Off-the-shelf tools cover parts of that chain, none cover all of it, which is why software development in Long Eaton is so often a phased bespoke job.

Derby. Derby has 7,565 enterprises, including 565 in transport and storage, and the council describes it as home to Europe's largest cluster of private-sector rail businesses (Derby City Council, March 2023). Rolls-Royce announced more than 1,000 new Derby jobs in March 2024 as its Raynesway site doubles in size (TheBusinessDesk, March 2024), and Infinity Park is one of three East Midlands Investment Zone sites in a £160m programme targeting 4,300 jobs (EMCCA, October 2025). The supply chain beneath those names includes many small precision engineers, fabricators and distributors. That is the audience for software development in Derby.

Leicester. A caution: Made Smarter Adoption for Leicestershire manufacturers is reported to have closed on 31 March 2025 (LLEP). Leicester firms should look at the Business Gateway Growth Hub's Business Growth Grant, which has offered £2,000–£25,000 at 35% of project cost for B2B SMEs trading 12 months or more. See software development in Leicester.

What could the grant cover? A worked example

Say a 15-person Derbyshire engineering firm wants a quoting and stock system because quotes take a day and stock counts are unreliable.

Those build figures are other agencies' published ranges, not ours. We quote a fixed price per phase after discovery, which also happens to be the format a grant application needs: a written scope, a cost, a timeline and the outcome you expect.

One rule that applies to most public grants: do not start the project or pay a deposit before the grant is approved, or the spend is usually ineligible.

What other funding sits alongside Made Smarter?

• EMCCA Business Investment Fund. Announced 7 September 2026 and launching late 2026, with a Business Growth and Productivity Grant covering machinery, equipment, technology, innovation and expansion, plus a Business Energy Saving Grant, for SMEs across Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. Around 500 businesses are expected to be supported; grant sizes were not published at the time of writing (EMCCA, September 2026). We explain what is known in the EMCCA Business Investment Fund explained.
• Local Growth Fund. The £107m fund approved on 29 June 2026 includes £8.1m for business investment and £12.3m for innovation and cluster development (EMCCA, June 2026).
• High Growth Accelerator. Run by East Midlands Chamber with UK Shared Prosperity funding, for manufacturing, green tech and creative or digital firms (East Midlands Growth Hub, 2026).
• R&D tax relief. Under the merged scheme for accounting periods from 1 April 2024, qualifying development attracts a 20% above-the-line credit, and first-time claimants must notify HMRC within six months of the period end (ICAEW, 2024). We can document the technical uncertainty we solve so your adviser has something to work from. Take professional tax advice.

How do you apply for Made Smarter East Midlands?

1. 1Contact the East Midlands Growth Hub. It is the route into Made Smarter and the Business Investment Fund alike.
2. 2Have the diagnostic. A funded adviser maps your processes and identifies where digital tools would pay back. Go in with the bottleneck, not a product name.
3. 3Get a scoped quote. The application needs a defined project, cost and outcome. Our discovery phase is designed to produce that: a written specification and a fixed price per phase.
4. 4Submit and wait for approval. Do not commit spend until it is confirmed.
5. 5Deliver in phases. Ship the first module early. For Webro the whole agent took three weeks; for a multi-module system, a first live module in 8–12 weeks is realistic.

What we have learned building software for East Midlands manufacturers

The Webro project came to us through our East Midlands Chamber business adviser. Before the client was discussed in detail, we were asked to review the technical brief and say whether we could solve it. We proposed three weeks. Only then did we learn that another team had taken it on with a three-month expectation and returned it undelivered. We can't speak for why the earlier attempt failed. What we can say is that the brief came first, and the workflow was built around the real stages of an order: email intake, PDF extraction, part matching, quotation preparation and human approval.

The director's words afterwards: "I can't believe that not only were you able to deliver everything I ever dreamed about, but you did it in only three weeks and on less budget than the previous agency charged."

Manufacturers who have reviewed us on Google say similar things about the way we work:

"Brilliant service super quick plus did a first class website for my company: Just Engineers Technical Solutions Ltd Thanks Amit" (William Williamson)

"Great service and results.. fully recommended built our website for NOPE-Group" (Mr Collins)

5.0 from 50 Google reviews.

Where to go next

If you are in Derby or Derbyshire, our software development Derby page covers what we build for engineering and supply-chain firms and what it costs. If you are in Long Eaton or Erewash, see software development Long Eaton, which includes a worked build-or-buy comparison for a 15-person upholsterer. For the AI end of things, see AI automation and AI automation in Long Eaton.