Supply chains in digital makeover through five new projects 

Digital Catapult has today announced five new projects backed by titans of industry joining its Made Smarter Innovation | Digital Supply Chain Hub, tackling major supply chain challenges. 

The Hub will drive adoption of advanced digital technologies to create more efficient, resilient and sustainable supply chains. This digital innovation ecosystem empowers cross-industry organisations to work together and share learnings.

The Hub is awarding £320,000 in total to two research projects and three technology – focused projects aiming to understand, predict and adapt to the pressures facing supply chains today. The programme will allow organisations and research bodies to trial and test the use of digital technologies to better prepare for the many factors that can destabilise a supply chain and have a severe impact on the coordination of materials and goods, such as economic instability and unexpected interruptions, natural disasters and the outbreak of war. 

With sponsorship from leading organisations including BAE Systems, the Food Standards Agency, Zoll, Nissan, Schneider Electric, Sainsbury’s and Cranswick, the projects will use advanced digital technologies to address supply chain issues that have severely impacted UK industry. The projects will be addressing issues including supply chain collaboration, resilience, mapping, and sustainability, along with supply and demand imbalances.

Participating organisations and projects include:

• WMG aims to provide a synthesised definition of supply chain resilience and identify appropriate mitigation strategies to improve end-to-end supply chain resilience.
• Infoculture aims to develop a concept framework and model for effective governance of UK supply chain collaboration. These objectives will be captured in a roadmap, and a proof of concept demonstration.
• Using cutting edge natural language processing and machine learning technology, Versed AI will build on existing capability to identify supply chain relationships and products.
• Data Catalyst will develop the capabilities of Smart ESG, their low-friction ESG product for SMEs to tackle the essential but complex problem of scope three emissions in the supply chain.
• Singular Intelligence will develop a cost-effective AI-driven supply and demand sensing solution for SMEs that can accurately anticipate market signals and reduce the risk of supply-demand imbalance. 

Jeremy Silver, CEO of Digital Catapult, said:

“With supply chain challenges so often in the news these days, Digital Catapult is proud to fund a fascinating range of innovation projects to help tackle the challenges associated with advanced technology adoption within supply chains.

“Our first tranche of projects as part of the Digital Supply Chain Hub demonstrates the breadth of expertise and technology available to start to solve some of these challenges around sustainability, resilience and efficiency.”

Chris Pett, Head of Supply Chain at BAE Systems, said:

 “The Digital Supply Chain Hub is helping identify and address some of the current Supply Chain challenges that UK industry is facing.

 “The Hub is made up from a wide ranging list of different industry members  and yet the Supply Chain challenges we face are all very similar; through the leadership of the Digital Catapult along with close working with industry we are looking for technological solutions and accelerating our learning so that we can help deliver digital capability to bridge these challenges with pace.”

For more information about the work of the Digital Supply Chain Hub, visit www.dsch.uk

Notes to editor

Full list of participating projects:

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WMG is a world leading research and education group, transforming organisations and driving innovation through a unique combination of collaborative research and development, and pioneering education programmes. The Supply Chain Research Group at WMG is at the forefront of developing and applying innovative supply chain strategies and practical solutions to boost resilience, increase productivity, improve sustainability, create value and digitally transform the manufacturing supply chain. 

WMG aims to provide a synthesised definition of supply chain resilience, develop a framework for assessing supply chain resilience and identify appropriate mitigation strategies to improve end-to-end supply chain resilience via academic research and industry engagement.

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Infoculture offers disruption through data. We assemble fit-for-purpose interdisciplinary teams of specialists to provide effective solutions to the business challenges and opportunities, where data plays a relevant role. 

Our ambition is to contribute to the broader MMS roadmap in terms of proposing actions and mechanisms that support greater and enhanced collaboration amongst supply chain partners partly, but not exclusively, through the secure permissioned sharing and exchange of data. The aim is to develop a concept framework and model for effective governance of UK supply chain collaboration. These objectives will be captured in a roadmap, a proof of concept demonstration, and testimony from participants in workshops and related projects delivering solutions in this vein.

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Versed AI provides companies with multi-tier supply chain visibility, surfacing previously unknown supply chain relationships down to tier-n. Using cutting edge Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technology, Versed AI is able to identify multi-tier supply chain relationships, analyse complex networks to identify risk concentrations, and support intelligent decision-making. 

For the Made Smarter Innovation Digital Supply Chain Hub, Versed AI will build on its existing capability to identify supply chain relationships; secondly we will develop new AI-based technology to identify product no the node; and thirdly we will develop a methodology to present relevant supply chains to clients based on bill of materials as a starting point.

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Data Catalyst is an Innovate-UK funded start-up helping SMEs, large enterprises, and Government to connect to sources of smart, open, personal, and commercial data, simply and securely, with crystal-clear privacy and managed consent.

Smart ESG is Data Catalyst’s low-friction ESG product for SMEs and all those who do business with them, powered by connected data from apps and services that businesses already use, without expensive manual data gathering. This innovation programme will help us expand our offering to tackle the essential but complex problem of scope three emissions in the supply chain.

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Singular Intelligence offers Artificial Intelligence products and platforms enabling better commercial decisions at scale for Consumer goods companies – manufacturers, retailers and online. The company has Global and regional FMCG and retailers as its customers and is funded by Oxford University and InnovateUK, the UK innovation agency.

Our project will develop a cost-effective AI-driven supply and demand sensing solution for SMEs that can accurately anticipate market signals (at macro and micro levels) and reduce the risk of supply-demand imbalance. SMEs can integrate this demand-sensing solution with their existing and future demand planning solutions.