Authentise and partners awarded UK Innovation Grant for wider digital supply chain adoption
August 11, 2021
Authentise, a developer of Additive Manufacturing workflow tools founded in San Francisco, California, USA, with offices in London, UK; Kiev, Ukraine; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, is leading a team of industry leaders in a project titled Digital Supply Chain Adoption Curve (DSCAC), which has been accepted for a UK Innovation grant for the competition ‘Manufacturing made smarter: digital supply chain, feasibility studies.’
The project, begun on April 5, 2021, will run for a projected period of six months, and aims to provide a product roadmap to deliver the vision of a fully integrated digital supply chain. While this goal is not a new one, as industry has long known that digital supply chain integration could deliver significant value in terms of efficiency, agility and security, its uptake was previously stifled by a lack of adoption. The project posits that adoption was held back by the fact that the tools offered don’t address the needs and fears of supply chain participants – SMEs in particular.
Through Authentise’s previous work on both connected Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and research related to lightweight digital supply chain tools, Authentise discovered new opportunities to address some of the challenges that have prevented full integration. One recognised need is for intermediate products that address a particular need while limiting the information requirement, enabling faster adoption of a fully digital supply chain. It is important that these tools are considered holistically to ensure that they are contributing to the vision of a fully integrated supply chain.
In the DSCAC project, the main aim is to develop an integrated supply chain by learning through reviewing existing solutions and literature, as well as questioning key supply chain stakeholders; designing and identifying potential product areas – both served and unserved – and compiling full product definitions on each of them; and high-level testing, with industry interviews and granular tests in the TWI test bed.
The project will not just result in a report, but aims to develop a full set of product definitions that industry participants can use to identify and de-risk potential market opportunities, something Authentise says has not previously been available.
The collaboration of research organisations (JI4C, TWI) and a certification agency (Lloyd’s Register) with Authentise will ensure that the solutions developed have both regulatory and academic rigour 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.
