Seven reasons to get excited about the Smart Manufacturing Data Hub project

What is blockchain technology?

First up, let’s look at what blockchain is and why it’s useful for manufacturing. Supply chains in the manufacturing and mobility sectors are often quite complex and far reaching. And due to the current climate, as well as a general lack of digitalisation and automation within these supply chains, they are suffering at the moment. What can definitely help in this area is blockchain. 

Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT), and it benefits manufacturers by maintaining an immutable record that provides everyone involved (designers, engineers, managers, vendors, key decision-makers etc) with access to the most up-to-date records and IP. It’s distributed nature means it is also great for transparency and reliable record-keeping – both of which are vital to the success of manufacturing and supply chains. 

This is where ByzGen’s latest Smart Manufacturing Data Hub project comes in. It can help by testing ways for blockchain technology to bring these benefits to life.

The Smart Manufacturing Data Hub (SMDH) project 

What is the SMDH project?

The Smart Manufacturing Data Hub (SMDH) project at Ulster University, has been set up to boost the productivity and competitiveness of UK manufacturers.

Backed by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)’s Made Smarter Innovation challenge, the £50 million hub will support small and medium size manufacturers to capture and better utilise their data, helping them increase productivity, growth, and sustainability.

Nearly 10,000 manufacturers from industries like food and drink to aerospace, will be supported to develop, test and adopt the latest data-driven technologies, including FALKOR the enterprise blockchain platform from ByzGen. And 13,000 jobs will be supported – boosting economic growth across the UK.

The project is currently up and running and SMEs are being invited to join. The component involving our FALKOR platform is being built out now, and integration is in progress. This will be up and running as a pilot early in the new year. 

As part of the solution to increasing productivity, growth, and sustainability, there’s an emphasis on new technologies. Blockchain falls into this category, and specifically our enterprise blockchain platform FALKOR SI – given the capabilities it carries within its data layer. Hence our involvement. 

There are a number of data activities, like data input, data exchange, and data output, that need to be distributed around a manufacturing ecosystem. There’s also a need to assure and audit what’s happened to data pre, during, and post analysis. FALKOR SI’s out of the box functionality will ensure these data activities can happen and enable data assurance and data audit processes.

Seven reasons to get excited about the Smart Manufacturing Data Hub project  

Here’s why everyone in the manufacturing sector - from small companies to systems integrators - can get a much needed boost by getting involved in the project and staying abreast of the latest developments:

1. Stay competitive by applying innovative tech. Blockchain can help your project to provide solutions using the latest data driven technologies like FALKOR SI, the out of the box blockchain solution used by leading tech companies like Atos. FALKOR SI makes accessing and using complex data ecosystems easy. It ensures that there’s one backend gateway for all blockchain related infrastructure, storage, and capability for all applications using data within the project.
2. It’ll help you, your customers, partners, and supply chain to trust the data you’re using. Blockchain can store, track, and make provable metadata pertaining to data that is being uploaded by companies, giving them the confidence to contribute their data. 
3. Keep track of what people are doing with data. FALKOR gives you the means to capture and audit events involving provable data. For example creation, reads, updates of data – and all events related to the data too.
4. Confidently control the exchange of your most confidential data. With blockchain you can assure the exchange of data between companies and data analysts, and give all parties the confidence they need to get involved with and fully commit to those exchanges. 
5. Stay on top of the insights and analyses you get from data. You can store, track, and make provable metadata pertaining to the outputs delivered by the data analysts, and the data analyst processes. Blockchain also allows for automation in the processes for upload, analysis, and exchange of the data. 
6. Build trust in AI powered insights. Blockchain allows you to track the ML (Machine Learning) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) models that run automatically on the company data ongoing, and provides the same level of tracking, provable states, and confidence around that as it does to data. ‍
7. Get insights and alerts integrated into the data-powered applications you want to use. A blockchain based events framework allows for integrated applications to be notified when certain events are seen on the blockchain. Users can then be alerted to them.

Stay in touch with the latest developments

Whether you work in manufacturing, or are someone with an interest in enterprise Blockchain or the Smart Manufacturing Data Hub project, we’ll be keeping our followers up to date in our monthly newsletter, The Frontier.

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