Funding is finally available to help UK manufacturers to develop innovative digital technologies to help transform their supply chains.
The fund – coming from Innovate UK – will support projects up to £1.5m and aims to create a more efficient, productive, flexible and resilient UK manufacturing sector.
The projects covered by the fund include those seeking to improve existing supply chains, those looking to redesign or re-engineer supply chains or those aiming to design completely new ones for new products or processes.
Projects can cover supply chain design or execution:
- Supply chain design – covering effective risk management, inventory optimisation, sustainable supply chains for increased flexibility, warehouse and logistics optimisation, confidence in shared data and new business models that affect the configuration of the supply chain.
- Supply chain execution – covering demand management, sensing and shaping, proactive use of demand data, delivery performance, improved decision-making through analytics, production planning or scenario modelling and track-and-trace technologies.
The exciting news comes after Wednesday’s webinar where panellists from the industry urged the government to offer more support for manufacturing in the UK and the PPE/manufacturing industry altogether. Adam Mansell, CEO of UKFT, spoke about the lack of funding and support from the government. “We are a much bigger industry than people even realize. We’ve created over ten million pounds of products, yet for years the government has never invested in our industry. They didn’t – and still don’t – understand we don’t have significant volumes of garment manufacturers in the UK”.
The webinar – Manufacturing in the UK: Challenges and Advantages – was a huge success with nearly 150 people tuning in to watch some of our industry’s finest talking about their experiences in manufacturing and answering your questions.
We would like to thank Gerber Technology for their partnership and all panellists that took part in this webinar – the first of many. Please keep your eyes peeled for our further four upcoming webinars – we hope you can make them.
For more information, visit www.UKFT.org. You can also view Manufacturing in the UK: Challenges and Advantages in its entirety here.
