A range of market trends are creating the urgent need for manufacturing industries to adapt the way they are organised and interlinked within the supply chains. This offers both threats and opportunities for the European manufacturing sectors, and leads to new and reconfigured supply chain configurations, collaborations and business models that shift from cost competitiveness to striving for the highest value. The INSPIRE project is targeted at analysing these trends, the way they may impact supply chain configurations, how flexibility can be designed into these new supply chains and industrial locations based on state of the art enabling technologies, as well as how benefits for resource efficiency and hence environmental footprint can be optimised.
The aim of this first deliverable is providing Business Cases which will serve to analyse the current European networks (as a collection of interrelated value chain partners such as raw material providers, manufacturers, logistics providers, clients, etc.), identify current practices of delocalization, opportunities for and barriers against flexibility as well as current practices for joint resource management and industrial symbiosis. The purpose of studying the selected cases is also to INSPIRE the community, i.e. Illustrate how flexibility can be achieved and how that provides value to aforementioned trends.
The Business Cases have been selected through desk research and consultation with high-level stakeholders. This first analysis is performed making use of the different project partners’ networks, previous EU projects (e.g. R4R, F³Factory, BIOCHEM, etc.) as well as other market clusters (e.g. the ECO-INNOVERA network of eco-industrial parks, the Smart Delta Resources regional cluster etc.).
24 business cases
The selection process has been performed in an iterative approach through 4 successive stages. After the provision of about 100 Business Cases an evaluation table was made with relevant criteria to select 24 preliminary suitable Business Cases. In order to get an overview a stratification has been made on intuition by the consortium with respect to types of manufacturing (process/discrete) and flexibility, sector and archetype. A final discussion giving the partners the opportunity to amend the obtained list resulted in a validated selection that will be used to describe the current European landscape and link it with intensified processing and flexibility environments and development of innovative business models for different sectors in general.
This report has to be considered as a living work document with the results of the validation of a first assessment to understand the current landscape of the European manufacturing/distribution of high value-added goods in horizontal and vertical strategies; 24 selected cases are categorized in:
- 10 “horizontal case studies” focusing on resource optimisation (especially local sourcing and industrial symbiosis),
- 14 “vertical case studies”, looking at the interconnection between discrete manufacturing and processing industries (especially in consumer targeted domains like the automotive sector).
Detailed study with interviews
These 24 preselected Business Cases will provide input to the next phase in which an in-depth analysis will be performed of a set-of complementary Business Cases, representing the different stratifications that have been defined by the partners. Based on a more detailed study including interviews we aim to get useful insights in what is interesting in view of the INSPIRE objectives.
Next stage in the INSPIRE project is to identify and characterize key technologies and horizontal eco-innovation concepts that enable flexibility & delocalization such that parties who desire and consider flexibility and delocalisation understand the characteristics, preconditions and potential of the different options. Therefore, the assessment should consider the current state of the technology (TRL), how the technology contributes to different types of flexibility, its potential business value and business impact (including the value network), sustainability, and regional economic impact (e.g. cluster, park, etc.). Also practical preconditions and critical success factors for change management will be identified.
For more information on this subject, get in touch with one of the INSPIRE partners.
