Digitising the chain

The new Field Lab called ‘The Smart Connected Supplier Network’ opened recently at the Hannover Messe. The Field Lab is focused on collaboration and sharing information across company borders in the high-tech supply chain.

The Field Lab is an initiative of the Dutch HTSM ‘top sector’, Brainport Industries, TNO, the manufacturing companies NTS-Group, KMWE and Euro-Techniek, and the ICT suppliers ISAH and MKG. The Field Lab was officially opened by Dutch Prime Minister Rutte and Ineke Dezentjé Hamming, chair of FME and Smart Industry. This new Field Lab is one of the ten Field Labs from the Dutch Smart Industry Action Agenda. The Field Lab’s Smart Connected Supplier Network is aimed at making it much easier to share data (in the form of product or design data and proposals and order data) securely, reliably and quickly without being hindered by the different systems used (interoperability). The Field Lab is focused on a network of suppliers made up of approximately 300 companies behind large high-tech corporations such as ASML, Thales and Philips Healthcare.

Pressure cookers

With support from TNO, the manufacturing companies and their ICT suppliers have made a start on the ‘digitisation of the chain’. In so-called ‘pressure cookers’, agreements have already been reached about how customers and suppliers can exchange orders digitally. 

A shared translation table in effect ‘translates’ the information from one application to the other, without the companies having to adapt their own ways of working. These agreements enable manufacturing companies to save a lot of time and money because the systems are better aligned with one another. Based on estimations, secure and efficient data exchange between industrial partners can generate improvements of up to 20% in terms of both costs and mistakes.

Simple, reliable and interoperable

The Smart Connected Supplier Network could achieve an international breakthrough in the longer term thanks to its lower transactional costs and fewer losses due to communication errors. Ultimately, this initiative is based on three crucial objectives: data can be shared easily (convenience/accessibility), data can be shared reliably (governance/security) and the data is interoperable.

Secure information exchange 

In the area of the data security, The Smart Connected Supplier Network will collaborate with the Field Lab called ‘The Garden’ initiated by Thales and also with the ‘Industrial Data Space’ initiative, which has been initiated by the German government and Fraunhofer and for which TNO and Fraunhofer signed an MoU on 13 April 2016.

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