Last week, on 27-28 June 2018, at the ASPECT Steering Committee meeting in Neu-Isenburg, Germany, the project partners jointly assessed the progress made after two years since the start of the project. Several innovations have already been delivered. Most notably, a mathematical model was developed to capture the variation of friction with temperature thus realistically representing process conditions in manufacturing lines. This state-of-the-art model will be presented by the researchers from Twente University at Numisheet 2018, a major event in the field of virtual engineering. Afterwards, the model will be validated on two industrial demonstrator processes.