Digital Supply Chain Hub: data governance, food emissions reporting, cybersecurity

Overview

UKRI are offering up to £150,000 per project to UK-registered businesses to develop a challenge focused minimum viable product (minimum co-investment of £100,000 from solution providers/grant recipients expected), plus further support and opportunities.

Scope

The Made Smarter Innovation | Digital Supply Chain Hub is on a mission to transform UK manufacturing through digitally-empowered supply chains that are more efficient, resilient and sustainable. To achieve this, the programme must address various digital supply chain issues focused around the hub’s seven core challenge themes.

This open call looks to develop solutions to issues that have arisen in three critical areas; data governance, reporting and verification of emissions across the food supply chain, and cybersecurity vulnerability. Applications are invited from companies interested in working with programme collaboration partners from the Digital Supply Chain Hub ecosystem.

As a delivery partner, Digital Catapult will facilitate and oversee the partnerships between technology innovators and programme collaboration partners, furthering digital adoption and driving innovation forward.

Eligibility

Applicants must be a UK based registered company – or prove they have an establishment in the UK and undertake the majority of the activity in the UK.
Applicants must be eligible to receive up to £150,000 in special drawing rights/De Minimis Aid
Applicants must have a UK business bank account for any payments to be made.
Applicants must be able to attend all of the activities as stated in programme obligations.

Applicants must ensure to comply with the following requirements:

Build an MVP against the chosen challenge brief.
Showcase tech solution developed in the programme – Digital Catapult does not take ownership of your intellectual property developed on the programme, however we do require you to present your solution relating to your challenge at the final showcase event February 2025.
Attend onboarding events hosted by Digital Catapult in August 2024 and final showcase February 2025.
Attend all of the workshops and/or webinars as agreed from August 2024 – February 2025 and stated in key dates.
We expect a minimum co-investment of £100,000 from solution providers/grant recipients. There are various categories of co-investment which can be considered. The Co-investments covers the value for money and cost to deliver the technology solutions. You can find further information on what co-investment we are looking for here.
Participant agrees to be visibly (name and logo) associated with the programme, whilst on the programme and afterwards as a former participant and beneficiary. This includes marketing collateral, such as website, print and digital materials.
Applicants must develop solutions enabled by at least one of the technologies from the advanced digital technology stack: artificial intelligence, immersive, internet of things, distributed ledger technologies and 5G/future networks.

Challenge 1: data governance for supply chains

Enabling and governing the exchange of information and value between participants in digitalising supply chains is a universal challenge that prevents the efficient flows of materials and money across supply chains. The development of an advanced data governance system in the mould of open banking (or equivalent) could foster a more collaborative supply chain.

Given the growing data and value flows across the Digital Supply Chain Hub ecosystem, there is a need to develop a data governance framework mechanism to build trust among participants. This will help ensure that their interests are maintained when sharing information with other participants in the ecosystem.

This challenge will provide two core capabilities:

Consensus mechanism: Enabling participants to co-design the rules for governing the exchange of information and value with ecosystem members..
Data governance framework: Codifying these rules into a technology solution which monitors participants’ compliance.

Once developed, the solution will be explored as a complement to other collaboration technology tools that we are developing across the Digital Supply Chain Hub ecosystem

Challenge 2: food supply chain carbon management

The “food carbon management” project aims to address the pressing issue of measuring carbon emissions in agriculture based supply chains by implementing a comprehensive carbon management system. This project integrates two core elements:

The ingestion of data for the measurement of supply chain practices.
The measurement of improvements against standardised metrics with a strong basis in empirical research, published data sets, and recognised standards like IPCC methodologies.

The project leverages the data and capabilities of the food and drink testbed to facilitate data exchange and analysis.

Challenge 3: cybersecurity vulnerability in supply chains

To understand supply chain vulnerabilities due to cybersecurity risk requires an understanding of the supply chain network, i.e. who is in your supply chain and whether they have exposure to cybersecurity risks.

In this challenge we are interested in testing whether supply chain cyber vulnerabilities and breaches can be found through available data whatever the source. We are aware that data mined from the dark web can identify cyber breaches and vulnerabilities within a company’s supply chain. This information can reveal their exposure to data leaks, even when they may not be aware of any breaches in their own business or supply chain. This will require both finding the data vulnerabilities and using these to build a picture of the potential supply chains and businesses exposed to these vulnerabilities. The ability to identify these vulnerabilities can then be offered as a service to industry.

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