Eleven more companies join Digital Catapult’s Digital Supply Chain Hub

Digital Catapult, the UK authority on advanced digital technology, has partnered with five leading technology companies and six pioneering SMEs to solve critical supply chain challenges facing small-to-mediumsized manufacturers across the country. As part of the Made Smarter Innovation | Digital Supply Chain Hub, the initiative will fund and facilitate the development of pioneering solutions to remedy significant industrial challenges, with a view to driving economic growth and advancing the UK’s manufacturing sector.

The competition will fund the development of advanced digital solutions with up to £100,000 for each tech company to deploy their solutions into the supporting manufacturer’s businesses, who will receive £25,000 to bolster this activity.

To maintain the UK’s position as number nine in the world in terms of manufacturing output, the challenges identified in this programme will be key to ensuring that manufacturers can look to innovation as a means of improving efficiency and achieving sustainable growth. These challenges include improving compliance and reducing the administrative burden on SMEs in the

FMCG industry through the use of digital and paperless systems, supporting export growth through improved compliance with export regulations; reducing waste in the textile industry through the use of digital infrastructure to explore the diversion of waste to secondary markets; providing visibility of inventory levels and/or delays in supply to enable better planning and prioritising by the SME manufacturer in the automotive industry; and understanding the true costs of purchasing materials so the SME manufacturers can make better decisions around sourcing and reduce their overall input costs.