Supply Chain Collaboration

An Innovative New Approach to Developing a Supply Chain Network

Funded through the NATEP programme, Spaces addresses issues in sharing information between partners involved in complex supply chain networks.

Introduction

The more complex a supply chain, the more likely there is to be waste, errors and delays in distributing project-orientated information. Organisations will each use their own preferred methods - from requiring their suppliers to use the same tool that they have adopted, to taking short cuts and sending files on consumer orientated cloud systems like Dropbox to insecure approaches such as thumb-drives and disks.

Welcome to Spaces - A Business to Business Collaboration Platform

Spaces uses a unique, intelligent, node-based technology - designed to bring information together from a wide variety of sources and (re)organise it in new, innovative ways - so that businesses can work seamlessly with their customers, suppliers and business partners - developing totally new services and solutions.

"Spaces breaks the traditional links between data, content and structure, to enable new information services and solutions to be quickly developed - so businesses can be 'hyper-connected' with their markets, sectors, products, people, places and devices."

How is this hyper-connectivity manifested in real-world business solutions? Spaces is ideal for advanced manufacturing businesses such as those in aerospace and rail where there is a growing demand for collaboration, to deliver extended enterprises at every tier of the supply chain, and where there is a growing trend towards delivering more complex, 'life term' product-service propositions.

The Spaces system evolved out of the potential the 'cloud' has to bring information components together - businesses, people, products, places - to form totally new, integrated, collaborative solutions. Defining the relationship between information is key to realising its inherent value. Spaces is designed to represent this value and make it easier to build the structures required as applications.

"Knowledge is power, and information is now rapidly becoming a key competitive advantage in business. Its capture and use is increasingly important to predictively resolve problems and realising commercial opportunity."

The value of information has grown substantially as new tools emerge to efficiently generate, realise and harness this business value as an asset at ever greater scale - including information from IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) and business-social media, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Industry 4.0.

Data is the new currency and so this valuable asset will increasingly be a key component in any product or service offering - if not the key competitive differentiator.

So Spaces enables organisations to capture, process and maximise the value of information, and then develop new business potential for customers whilst making existing operations more efficient in collaboration with supplier networks.

By breaking down information traditionally held within the confines of businesses, and reforming this around the needs of business in a collaborative world, Spaces caters for the development of new disruptive technology solutions using ‘meta’ business workgroups, shared workspaces, and applications.

These systems form solution platforms for:
  • Collaborative bidding and b2b trading
  • Business consortium, cluster, and private network development
  • Support for the delivery of larger and/or more complex work packages
  • Cross industry sector, multi-vendor, product-service collaborations
  • The involvement and integration of specialist, professional or academic knowledge
  • Visibility across entire end-to-end extended enterprise supply chains
  • Efficient, streamlined, inter-business sharing
  • Seamlessly integrated Internet of Things information flows
  • The development of applications using blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies
"In manufacturing, the transformation [goal] is to a 'connected everything', from how products are designed, manufactured and sold, to the development of value added business services delivering a connected consumer experience."


The New Meta-Organisation

Spaces greatly reduces the normal difficulties and 'friction' experienced when sharing information across the traditional boundaries of businesses - generating unnecessary cost, waste, delay and errors. Spaces addresses these issues whilst reducing the overall delivery costs, developing partnerships through cross organisational teams and supporting greater efficiency, security and oversight using a managed data communications process.

RuleIQ has identified a number of significant, new untapped opportunities for our system that ‘builds’ scale and volume in terms of networks and nodes. The system has so far focused on the supply chain in advanced manufacturing, but new potential projects have opened up the system’s capabilities in linking projects and assets with products, services and customers, enabling them to create new life-cycle solutions.

The approach will open up the potential for smaller organisations in particular to deliver and manage new products with embedded services (along the lines of in-flight engine management), as well as opportunities for RuleIQ in more consumer-orientated markets (e.g. financial services) where the customer becomes central to the halo of information surrounding them, driving its use through adoption, permission and sharing with others.


Key Benefits
  • Increased efficiency and productivity through deploying private, independent, supply chain networks
  • Reduced time to react through instant, streamlined sharing, irrespective of the network or supply chain size
  • Reduced costs when managing complex, distributed jobs, tasks and processes with a shared workflow*
  • Improved competitiveness through greater business agility with desktop-browser or mobile apps that can be accessed anywhere, supported through instant alerts via text and email for new information updates and requests
  • Improved security and information integrity with a ‘single point of truth’ for shared information using projects, file versioning and a ‘share-once’ principle to reduce or eliminate multiple versions of the same file
  • Improved management through end-to-end supply chain transparency and visibility, including automatic mapping (geographic / network diagrams)
  • New business through business profiling and promotion across the networks, whilst reducing risk by finding suitable alternative suppliers
  • More business potential for larger and/or more complex work packages by being able to manage combined capacity with partner organisations
  • Higher margins through new product-services and solutions for customers, with in-built apps, and including mobile app versions

Benefits

FAC, in conjunction with RuleIQ, now offers a simple and easy to adopt approach to sharing information efficiently and effectively, between all tiers in a supply chain partnership. Spaces is a cloud based solution designed from the ground up to offer a common approach. It profiles, maps and links organisations together so that the process of sharing information across multiple tiers is performed instantly, no matter the complexity of the relationship between customer and supplier(s). 

To access the FAC collaboration system email support@fac.org.uk and we will send through login details.

For assistance with using the system please contact the same email address and view the walk-through guide here.


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