Accelerating Cross-sector Collaborative Ecosystems and Sustainable Supply-chains (ACCESS)

There is an immediate need for granular supply-chain intelligence and proactive risk mitigation through collaboration and focused intervention, to prevent good UK aerospace, automotive and other HVM SMEs from getting into unrecoverable financial difficulties.

However, in order to mitigate impact of Covid-19, UK aerospace and automotive manufacturing businesses can no longer work in silos and compete as individual organisations. Instead, they must connect and collaborate with customers and suppliers so that they can compete as integrated, cross-sector manufacturing ecosystems, which enables organisations to focus on core competences, benefit from economies-of-scale and share knowledge.

This project will address significant barriers that inhibit growth of cross-sector manufacturing ecosystems; such as supply chain transparency, data security, trust, engagement and lack of digitalised infrastructure to streamline the capture, curation and analysis of reliable supply-chain big data.

**ACCESS Innovations:**

* launch a cross-sector SME-focused supply-chain collaboration digital marketplace that will enable B2B tendering and collaboration
* establish a freemium smart manufacturing app-store that will drive SME engagement and incentivise users to maintain profile data, connect with other network users and drive collaboration
* generate cross-sector classification taxonomy that underpins B2B matchmaking AI to automatically recommend connections for work package tenders and innovation consortium

**ACCESS Outcomes:**

* unprecedented multi-tier visibility of UK aerospace and automotive supply-chain which will reduce sub-tier risks and increase on-shoring opportunities
* connect aerospace and automotive suppliers with cross-sector high growth opportunities such as rail, sustainable transport and renewable energy supply-chains
* enable aerospace and automotive manufacturing SMEs to identify new sustainable supply-chain opportunities, to catalyse business re-purposing, mitigate business downturn and loss of critical skills
* provide UK OEMs and Government bodies with unprecedented granular industry intelligence to focus policy and intervention support, ensuring UK taxpayer's money deployed most effectively to re-grow UK aerospace and automotive manufacturing whilst focusing on sustainability and green agenda.