To Me, To You: Improving Supply Chain Communications with Digital Technologies

In highly regulated industries such as aerospace, the traditional exchange of physical paperwork causes delays, introduces errors and reduces the efficiency of individual manufacturers and the overall supply chain. There is therefore a need for Industrial Digital Technologies (IDTs) that enable suppliers to quickly and easily share key information and documentation with their customers, providing a demonstrable single point of truth for both parties in the business relationship, and ensuring that products meet required and expected specifications.

We therefore propose a multi-disciplined project with three phases of learning, development and testing. This will enable us to increase our understanding of the problems identified, start developing and testing IDTs to address these problems, and propose a follow-on project that would expand the learnings into an industrial research project.

The project will be conducted as a collaboration between four parties: two complimentary technology solutions providers, Elements Technology and Pathfindr; the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC); and an SME manufacturer within a major aerospace supply chain, Produmax.

Industrial research will initially be conducted by the AMRC (led by Prof Rab Scott); with the learnings of this then informing the development of two innovative IDTs by Elements Technology and Pathfindr to provide suppliers and customers within a supply chain with a simple method to communicate information about production, certification, transport, and delivery. Unlike existing IDTs, the proposed technologies will enable manufacturers to easily share information in a secure environment, with a particular focus on automating information distribution by utilising APIs and integrations (both internal and external). These IDTs will then be tested in a working scenario within a sub-section of an active aerospace supply chain, and using a novel configurable industrial testbed developed by the AMRC as part of the project.

The project outputs will initially be targeted at the 20'000 SME UK-based manufacturers that are part of aerospace supply chains. If 5% of this target market utilise the developed technologies, we project that the developed IDTs could save manufacturers £220m/year in labour costs currently lost to unproductive activity, enabling them to generate an extra £2.2b/year in turnover, creating a Return on Investment (ROI) of 7'957:1 to taxpayers on the £276'480 investment.

Furthermore, we project the outputs of the product will generate £73.6m turnover for the project partners combined (over five years), an ROI of 880:1 on the combined £83'129 contribution to this project.