Data and AI in the Digital Economy

Lead DIGIT Lab Academics: Professor Roger Maull and Maximilian Stout (PhD student)

Challenge/research question and methodology
The PhD project is being conducted in partnership between the University of Exeter and the Management Consultancy, Vendigital. It seeks to use Machine Learning to Tag Suppliers, within an established taxonomy, to identify which components are manufactured or sold by which suppliers enabling the recommendation of alternative sources in case of disruptions in the Supply Chain by linking databases between clients.

Progress
To enable accurate Tagging of Suppliers a “Golden Dataset” is being curated to identify all the data sources that have important information and pre-processing to train the Machine Learning framework to make predictions under the established taxonomy.

Outcomes
The desired outcome is the application of Machine Learning in forecasting supplier unreliability, it is hoped to find hidden signs within the spend analytics of suppliers being unable to meet demands before impacting the supply chain.