Innovating the future of supply chains at the Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence

The Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with import and export challenges resulting from Brexit and wider geopolitical crises continue to highlight the fragile and fractured nature of global supply chains. They expose the vulnerabilities in the organisations and their supply chains and their ability to cope with changes in demand and supply.  Better supply chain resilience, efficiency and sustainability through better supply chain collaboration and end-to-end supply chain visibility are clear objectives of any organisation across the world. 

Strategic supply chain management through digitalisation and excellence and better collaboration between government, industry and academia is in the centre of attention for any government from any political frame. Simultaneously, innovation through utilising advanced technology in a smart, collaborative and trusted environment is sparking opportunities for economic growth with a reduced carbon footprint and improving supply chain resilience and efficiency.

Officially launched in May 2024, the Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence (CDSCE) is a physical and digital space which brings together insights from practice and world-leading research expertise to test and deploy technological innovations, driving best practice and improving supply chain processes and operations efficiency and sustainability. Being sector agnostic, the Centre seeks to address the pressures on manufacturing, service and public sectors and their supply chains caused by competitive market, uncertainties, global politics, the pandemic, environment, and energy crisis. Due to its geographic location, it is primarily established to service the North of England and Scotland, areas which have high concentrations of industry and are under-served in the field of digital supply chain research and development. The Centre also tries to focus more on these regions for the matter of leveraging the digital supply chain and operations excellence in these areas. However, it is also open to any relevant collaboration with industry and academia in other parts of the UK. As part of a strategic collaboration with the Digital Supply Chain Hub programme, part of Digital Catapult, the Centre also facilitates significant cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral activities such as flagship projects and programmes, executive professional development courses and consultancy through its membership and physical and digital facilities such as recently developed spares digital supply chain testbed. 

The vision of the Centre is to be globally recognised as a bespoke centre of excellence for research and innovation in digital supply chain management, connecting academia and industry to co-create knowledge, innovation and impact. The Centre offers an exciting opportunity for organisations and stakeholders to further understanding and collaborate to co-create new intelligence and impactful and innovative solutions. The Centre will transform and simplify complex, labour intensive supply chain processes and operations to ones driven by data, digitisation, and automation. Furthering research and development of AI/Machine learning and computational models to optimise materials and inventory, will reduce cost and environmental impact and increase productivity.

The Centre will evaluate supply chain trends, models and strategies deployed, the impact of culture, trust, data sharing and digitisation upon local and global supply chain practice and relationships. Through the Centre’s digital twin testbed, organisations can plug in data, simulating real-world operations in a test environment that allows for controlled experimentation of new innovative and validated solutions. The very recent success stories of the Centre are secured two-year project (£315K Digital Catapult funding through the Digital Supply Chain Hub) and extensive research collaboration agreement with the Northumbria Healthcare Facilities Management Ltd with the first phase *(value of £62.5k) to be completed in August 2024.  

For any further information or enquiries, please contact Dr Alirez Shokri via Alireza.shokri@northumbria.ac.uk or via CDSCE@northumbria.ac.uk.