Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NEXT-NET (Next generation Technologies for networked Europe)

Teaser

Market and societal challenges are creating the urgent need for companies to significantly adapt the way they are organised and interlinked within Supply Chains. Customisation, climate changes, scarcity of resources, acceleration of the technological development bring threats...

Summary

Market and societal challenges are creating the urgent need for companies to significantly adapt the way they are organised and interlinked within Supply Chains. Customisation, climate changes, scarcity of resources, acceleration of the technological development bring threats and opportunities for the European manufacturing sectors, as well as for the distribution and logistics sector and lead to the need of new and reconfigured supply chains and collaboration mechanisms that shift from cost competitiveness to striving for the highest value.
The goals of NEXT-NET project are:
Goal 1. “Creating a European network reaching a critical mass of relevant stakeholders from all targeted industries and scientific domains, from different levels of the supply chain as well as politicians, and decision makers to work together on the definition of a roadmap for Supply chain.
Goal 2. “Identifying common trends & challenges in research, technology as well as broader innovation-related areas”: study socio-economic, political and legal trends and drivers in the market and their impact on innovation and technology development.
Goal 3.” Identify future industrial scenarios”: identify industrial scenarios for 2030 based on the analysis of trends at social, economic, environmental technological and political level and the way they impact on supply chains in order to define how future supply chains could be designed to answer the specific challenges
Goal 4. “Developing a strategic research agenda and a joint strategy and action plan”: (i) develop the Strategic Research Agenda for supply chains of the future where research and innovation priorities are identified for each future scenario by exploiting existing enabling technologies, and also by proposing new adhoc ones for the full integration of production and distribution processes. (ii) develop an action plan with policy recommendation and timeline for the implementation of the research priorities of the Strategic Research Agenda.
The full coverage of the topics of NEXT-NET is assured by a comprehensive and complementary consortium where all these areas are represented by partners already engaged in several initiatives and projects for research and innovation in the area of SC. The NEXT-NET consortium is led by CNR-STIIMA and includes PNO consulting, Zaragoza Logistics Centre, INESC TEC, Frauhnofer-IML, and Aston University.

Work performed

Goal 1. “Creating a European network reaching a critical mass of relevant stakeholders from all targeted industries and scientific domains”: The consortium has worked for the creation of an expert community developing a network of people interested on the SC topic and with a deep knowledge on the SC processes and strategies and the enabling technologies. The experts have been selected from academia, associations and industry. Representatives from the 3 sectors (discrete manufacturing, process industry and distribution & logistics) have been involved time by time according to the specific projects activities. They have been involved in the activities through different actions like workshops, seminars, consultation, expert elicitation and interviews.
Goal 2. “Identifying common trends & challenges in research, technology as well as broader innovation-related areas”: the consortium has conducted a deep analysis of the megatrends and trends which will influence the SC of the future considering different dimensions: political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental. This analysis is based on a systematic literature review of more than 300 reports, grey literature, sectorial studies, strategic roadmaps, governmental reports and scientific papers and on workshops with experts from both the academic and practitioner domains aiming to support the analysis by discussing, refining and extending the findings and insights gained from the literature review.
Goal 3.” Develop and assess future industrial scenarios”: definition of 1) MACRO-SCENARIOS: Based on the trends analysis, the consortium has identified projections for each variable as input for a Cross-Impact Balance Analysis. Future scenarios have been created using Gausemeier approach and out of all possible generated scenarios, 12 scenarios presenting high degree of consistency have been chosen. The entry probability and the expected potential pressure for changes on the supply chain caused by a scenario have been evaluated in an expert workshop. Based on this, six scenarios were selected which are probable and plausible and obligate a change to future SC. These scenarios have been used with 2) CONSEQUENCE MATRIX in order to define the supply chain characteristics and strategies. The most appropriate strategies to support the development of the SC in each scenario have been defined, which are categorized into eight strategic dimensions: Product & Service, Supply Chain Paradigm, Technology Level, Sourcing & Distribution, Supply Chain Configuration, Manufacturing Systems, Sales Channels and Sustainability.
Goal 4. “Developing a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) and a joint strategy and action plan”: the development of the agenda is based on the 1) TECHNOLOGIES MAPPING to SUPPLY CHAIN MODELS: analysing European roadmaps and other scientific reports, the consortium has defined a list of enabling technologies for future SC highlighting their TRL and implications on the SC performance (e.g. in terms of Agility, Costs & Transparency) and mapping the enabling technologies to the future supply chain scenarios using the technology portfolio approach adapted from strategy table designs. The result was validated through experts elicitation. Moreover 2) SPECIFIC CHALLENGES related to the SC processes and strategies and to associate the listed technologies to each scenario and SC strategies. The identification of challenges was performed in two stages. 3) RESEARCH NEEDS AND HORIZONTAL ACTIONS: Based on this work, the consortium has started a wide consultation to collect the opinion of the experts on the research priorities and horizontal actions for the future development of the SCs. This activity will go on also in the second period with the definition of the SRA and the Action plan for the policy recommendation.

Final results

The most important novelty of NEXT-NET is the merging of different perspectives in a shared view of the future, where the expectation at production level are inter-related to the expectation at distribution level.
NEXT-NET project will lay out the research and innovation priorities for the SC of 2030 and will be based on a methodological framework enabling the definition of breakthrough and disruptive technologies. Beside analysing the level of implementation of the most important EU roadmaps, the partners will also analyse national and where necessary/possible regional roadmaps. After this, a scouting process is implemented with the expert group and with the stakeholders in order to identify new technologies based on the status of development of the existing ones. This roadmap is expected to have an impact at: i) industrial level, supporting and defining a path for companies willing to be ready for the future ii) policy level, supporting the definition of actions to support industrial leadership at European level; iii) at training level, providing new content for educational and professional programmes; iv) at research level, providing basis for new projects.

Website & more info

More info: https://nextnetproject.eu/.