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Building on research in integrated information systems and their impact on organisational culture, Newcastle Business School (NBS), via a two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP 8193), assisted Inpipe Products (IPP) to increase its operational efficiency and turnover. IPP is a world leading company in the design, manufacture, supply and rental of pipeline maintenance equipment for the global oil and gas industry. The KTP explored and developed the cultural environment for successful implementation of an integrated information system. The result for the company is improved operational efficiency, with the processing time for products from sales to engineered drawings reduced from five hours to 15 minutes, a reduction in late deliveries due to better information on product specification and a 14% reduction in rejected products. Product sales turnover has increased from £5.5 million to £6 million per year.
The volume and diversity of data that companies need to handle are increasing exponentially. In order to compete effectively and ensure companies' commercial sustainability, it is becoming crucial to achieve robust traceability in both their data and the evolving designs of their systems. The CRISTAL software addresses this. It was originally developed at CERN, with substantial contributions from UWE Bristol, for one of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments, and has been transferred into the commercial world. Companies have been able to demonstrate increased agility, generate additional revenue, and improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness with which they develop and implement systems in various areas, including business process management (BPM), healthcare and accounting applications. CRISTAL's ability to manage data and their provenance at the terabyte scale, with full traceability over extended timescales, based on its description-driven approach, has provided the adaptability required to future proof dynamically evolving software for these businesses.
This case study embodies a non-linear relationship between underpinning research, software development and deployment. It involves computer science research at UWE in conjunction with its applied development for the world's largest particle physics laboratory and onward deployment commercially into private sector industry.
Research carried out by Manchester Metropolitan University into the management of town and city centres has directly led to key changes in policy and practice - in particular, the acceptance and adoption of new partnership approaches to town and city change now supported by the Departments of Business Innovation and Skills, and Communities and Local Government. The research has also impacted on professional practice internationally, through the development of a comprehensive set of principles, standards and approaches disseminated through the Institute of Place Management and aimed at empowering communities to better manage town centres for the benefit of the local community.
Significant economic impact was achieved as a result of research into polymer nanocomposites and their formation, conducted at WestCHEM from 2000 to 2010. Collaboration over the six-year period 2004-2010 with Carron Phoenix Ltd, the world's largest manufacturer of composite `granite' kitchen sinks, led to nanocomposite technology being incorporated into over one million sinks, generating income for the company in excess of £50M from 2007 to the present day. Considerable production efficiency gains saved in excess of £1M annually through the reduction in manufacturing time, the reduction of raw materials wastage, and the reduction in landfill costs (and commensurate environmental benefit) for failed and out-of-spec products. In addition, a £4M capital investment by the company at the Falkirk plant was secured, enabling the company to sustain its leading position in the designer kitchen sink market. With the site consequently designated as the parent company's competency centre for composite sink technology, employment for 170 workers was secured.
Economic impact is claimed through the growth of the biopharmaceutical spin-out company Q Chip Ltd. During the REF period, this has created 19 new jobs, £7.5M investment, a new Dutch subsidiary (Q Chip BV), and staged-payment, six figure contract sales to four major international pharmaceutical companies.
Q Chip has generated over £928K in contract sales from the pharmaceutical industry from 2008-2012, with further sales of over £1M projected in 2013-14.
Originally established by Professor David Barrow in 2003 from his micro technology research, Q Chip has developed new processes and miniaturised equipment to encapsulate materials, including drugs, within uniform polymeric microspheres as injectable therapeutics.
Impact: Controller Area Network (CAN) is a digital communications bus used by the automotive industry for in-vehicle networks. The underpinning research introduced techniques that enable CAN to operate under high loads (approx. 80% utilisation) while ensuring that all messages meet their deadlines. The research led directly to the development of commercial products, now called Volcano Network Architect (VNA) and the Volcano Target Package (VTP). This Volcano technology (VNA and VTP) is now owned by Mentor Graphics. In recent years, VNA has been used to configure CAN communications for all Volvo production cars, with VTP used in the majority of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in these vehicles, including the S40, S60, S80, V50, V70, XC60, XC70, XC90, C30, and C70; total production volume 330,000 to 450,000 vehicles per year. This Volcano technology is also used by Jaguar, LandRover, Aston Martin, Mazda, and the Chinese automotive company SAIC. It is used by the world's leading automotive suppliers, including Bosch and Visteon. It is also used by Airbus.
Modern processor architectures (networked multi/many-core nodes), together with society's expectation of evermore-complex applications, require fluent mastery of concurrency. To enable this mastery, in the last two decades our group has taught, researched and developed fundamental notions of concurrency, new programming languages (occam-pi, and the KRoC toolset), libraries (JCSP, CCSP, C++CSP, CHP), runtime systems (the KRoC/CCSP multicore scheduler) and tools based on formal process algebra (Hoare's CSP, and Milner's pi-calculus).
Our work has had impact in providing new mechanisms for software development in a number of sectors such as chip design, large-scale real-time systems, formal interfaces and testing and the space industry. Testimonials supporting this are available from a variety of industrial and commercial sources (NXP Semiconductors, Big Bee Consultants, Philips Healthcare, 4Links Ltd. and Microsoft Research Cambridge). The breadth of impact of the work is evidenced by download statistics, as well as by third-party contributions to libraries and documentation.
Publically and industrially funded research at Loughborough University into the simulation, monitoring and control of electronics soldering has had significant impact in the development of new software and hardware technologies, which have delivered substantial commercial and economic benefits, with examples cited for at least two leading companies. One key commercial product is a modelling tool that optimizes reflow oven settings quickly, easily and accurately. It optimises oven settings each time a new product or solder paste is introduced, reducing set up times and scrap levels. More than 700 systems per year continue to be sold, with 90% exported.
The GRANIT system is a non-destructive technique for assessing the condition of rock bolts and ground anchors used to support structures such as tunnels. It applies a small impulse to the bolt and interprets the resulting vibration response to provide estimates of load and unbonded length. Initial development of the system was based on the findings of EPSRC projects in tunnels undertaken by the Universities of Aberdeen and Bradford from 1989-1997, resulting in an empirically based method. However, research undertaken at the University of Aberdeen since 1998 has provided the understanding of the process and developed the fundamental engineering science needed to underpin the development of a full commercial system. The GRANIT system is patented, and has been subject to worldwide licence to Halcrow who have undertaken testing and provided a method of ensuring the safety of mines, tunnels and similar structures. Halcrow received the NCE award for Technical Innovation Award for GRANIT in December 2010. The impact of the research has been in part economic, but largely on practitioners and professional services.
Prof. Andrew Fearne's consumer insight research project influenced marketing practice in almost 400 farming and small food businesses, while helping eight food industry associations and regional development agencies meet their remits. It also supported local supplier initiatives at the UK's largest supermarket, Tesco. A recent participant survey showed that 89% of farmers and small food producers who engaged with the project found that the consumer insight was either `quite' or `extremely useful'. Meanwhile, the project helped Tesco grow its sales of local food and drink from £0.5 billion (2005) to over £1 billion (2012) against average retail sales growth of less than 5% per year over the same period (Office of National Statistics).