The team of the Smart Mini Factory laboratory for Industry 4.0 is one of the participants of the first ESMERA challenge (http://www.esmera-project.eu/challenges/). In its first Open Call, ESMERA offered eight industrial challenges addressing real-life problems in four challenge areas: Energy, Manufacturing, Construction and Agri-food. The Smart Mini Factory participates together with the Lead Partner Carretta srl from Treviso in the Manufacturing challenge. The focus will be on the development of a robotic solution to improve the productivity as well as ergonomics of a wire harness assembly at the company Elvez in Slovenia. Last week the project team of the Smart Mini Factory, leaded by Dr. Ilaria Palomba, visited the company together with the second participant of the challenge, the challenge coordinator from Technical University of Munich and with the head of R&D at Elvez.