Digital Twin of SE Scotland Manufacturing Supply Chains

Covid-19 has exposed the vulnerabilities in many organisations’ supply chains: disrupted supplies of finished goods and shortages of raw materials causing disruption, especially to those with long international supply chains. For decades focus has been on supply chain optimization to minimize costs and inventories, and to increase asset utilization. However, as inventory buffers are reduced the flexibility to absorb disruptions is diminished. Covid-19 has highlighted to companies the need to understand the vulnerability of their supply chain relationships to shocks and to redesign those supply chains for increased resilience and sustainability with a view towards future Net Zero obligations.

There is a need for industry and policy makers to understand the supply chains of the SE Scotland region. This project would work with industrial partners, local councils and government to build proof-of-concept digital twin of the manufacturing supply chains of the region, quantifying the supply of goods between companies and modelling the complex interactions across supply-chains.

There will be three areas to be addressed by the project:

• Resilience of the supply chain
• Carbon footprint of the supply chain – build an initial understanding of the nature of the goods moved through the supply chain and their CO2 footprint.

A further theme of the project will be to leverage the contact with manufacturers to assess existing digital skills and capabilities, and to identify skills gaps in the context of entire supply chains. This would form a key part of determining a demand signal for the Digital Academy on CAMAT (The Campus for Advanced Manufacturing and Technology – an initiative between University of Edinburgh, University of Strathclyde, Babcock, Fife Council & Fife College to set up a world-class large scale manufacturing research park at the Rosyth Shipyard).