First Article (FA) jobs and pilot production in manufacturing industries face several challenges, including high operational costs, skill shortages, inconsistent quality, and inefficiencies in traditional machine shops. These challenges significantly impact scalability, time-to-market, and overall efficiency. This paper presents a solution through collaboration with a Learning Factory, using a “Learn, Practice & Implementation” framework. This framework enables companies to learn advanced manufacturing principles, practice digital and automation technologies in a hands-on environment, and implement real products for testing within the smart engineering system & multi-site systems. By leveraging on high-availability connectivity and smart manufacturing platform capabilities, companies can form a multi-site distributed value chain with fast setup and changeover, allowing them to work with a Learning Factory for FA and pilot production. Moreover, with a fully connected and automated process-centric cell for multi-product manufacturing, companies can testbed and gain familiarity with cyber-physical and digital AI-based technologies, enabled by real-time predictive shopfloor technologies and distributed decision-making capabilities. This multi-site collaborative model brings benefits to the end-user companies with FA and pilot production needs, the ecosystem of system integrators and technology providers, and the Learning Factory itself.