Thu, 29 July, 2021
TWI is asking our Industrial Members for feedback on a new project related to the adoption of digital supply chains.
We are working alongside project leaders, Authentise, as well as Lancaster University’s Joining 4.0 Innovation Centre (J4IC) and Lloyd’s Register on the Innovate UK-funded, ‘Digital Supply Chain Adoption Curve (DSCAC)” project, which has just been accepted by Made Smarter Innovation delivered by the UK Research and Innovation competition, ‘Manufacturing Made Smarter: Digital Supply Chain, Feasibility Studies.’
The DSCAC project, which began on 5 April, is due to run for 6 months with the aim of providing a product roadmap that helps deliver the vision of a fully integrated, digital supply chain. This is not a new vision and could deliver significant value in terms of agility, efficiency and security, but it has been stifled by a lack of adoption amid the fears and needs of supply chain participants, particularly SMEs.
However, there still exist myriad opportunities to deliver value if the challenges that prevented full integration in the past can be addressed. This includes intermediate products that address a particular need while limiting the information requirement, allowing the adoption of a fully digital supply chain to be sped up. However, it is important that these tools are considered holistically to ensure that they are contributing to the vision of a fully integrated supply chain.
To progress this further, the DSCAC project will assess existing solutions and literature as well as questioning key supply chain stakeholders. Then a design phase can begin to identify potential product areas and compile full product definitions before testing takes place, including high level tests at TWI.
The result will be a full set of product definitions that industry participants can use to identify and de-risk potential market opportunities. This will create a product roadmap as the project partners bring their skills and expertise to bear to ensure solutions have both regulatory and academic rigor whilst maintaining an action oriented approach that software vendors can use to deliver real-world results, which may be pursued through a follow-on Industrial Research application.
As part of this, TWI is asking our Industrial Members for feedback so that we can ensure any solutions are in line with your needs and requirements.
Industrial Members can request a link to the questionnaire by emailing TWI’s Laser Additive Manufacturing Project Leader, Miguel Zavala at, Miguel.Zavala@TWI.co.uk.
The DSCAC project has received funding from Innovate UK under No 93256