Retention and Access Services in Supply Chains (RASSC)

Retention and Access Services in the Supply Chain (RASSC) aims to transform current approaches to data access and retention in data intensive supply chains. Our targets are the aerospace and the renewable energy industries, where a service-based approach provides a principled way to monetise information about the product over its life. Both third-party infrastructure suppliers and partners in the user-industry supply chain with will benefit from a blueprint for delivering new data access and retention services to the whole community. The benefits are short-term operational cost savings, improved data sharing in supply chains, and long-term mitigation of ‘cost of data loss’ (e.g. not having data easily available to meet regulatory compliance).
In this initial investigation, our target is barriers to adoption, with work done including (a) economic analysis of the underpinning business model; (b) investigation of how to integrate access services into existing company infrastructure; (c) policies needed for data security, safety, auditability and integrity; and (d) building and evaluating a demonstration system to gain insight into technical and operational challenges.