Uniting manufacturers and suppliers in a free and powerful platform – that’s the elevator pitch for the brand-new, completely free supply chain directory being launched yesterday by the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult and The Data City for the Made Smarter Innovation Digital Supply Chain Hub.
This powerful tool brings together hundreds of thousands of UK manufacturers and suppliers, across multiple sectors, into one user-friendly place.
At the basic level, the directory includes a wealth of information on each company, including size, location, specialty, contact details, directors, financials and more.
Companies are also able to ‘claim’ their profile – again, free of charge – to be able to enrich their publicly available information. By adding detailed information about their business, businesses can showcase their capabilities to enable new potential customers or suppliers to find them.
Forget the old days of searching the internet to find someone who can help you develop, scale-up or manufacture your product in the UK. This directory will get you the details on the companies you want to work with quickly and easily. You’ll find there’s a lot more in the UK than you thought.
Why is this directory needed?
Every 4 years or so we experience huge supply chain disruption due to national or global disasters and events.
Most recently, we saw the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic and its supply chain shocks. Before that, Brexit, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011 and the 2008 credit crunch all caused disruption.
Recovery from these events takes time, and it’s estimated 42% of companies lose a year’s worth of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) each decade through such impact on the supply chain.
We at the HVM Catapult believe that providing an higher quality and more extensive directory of UK manufacturers and suppliers than what’s currently available – and the resulting helicopter-view of the entire industry –can provide greater resilience to the sectoracross these impacts.
Faced with a supply chain disruption, the directory makes it easy to find a suitable, perhaps even local, alternative manufacturer. This helps to keep important goods in stores and supports the UK supply chain. Using local and UK suppliers also provides other benefits, such as greater innovation and closer relationships.
It sounds great, but who is it for?
Everyone connected to UK industry.
For manufacturing companies and trade bodies, it will both help quickly identify the perfect supplier to meet their needs, while also making sure those seeking the type of products they make or services they provide can find them more easily. And it opens new opportunities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing both within and across manufacturing sectors and disciplines.
Government at all levels, meanwhile, will be able to see exactly where particular manufacturing capabilities and businesses are located – an invaluable dataset when allocating resources and grants which helps to shape and focus policy.
Whilst there are other directories available on the internet right now, they are often sector- or region-specific. No other directory is available that offers such a broad range of market sectors across the whole UK.
That’s because most existing services only use companies’ SIC codes to populate their data. The UK Supply Chain Directory is unique because in addition to this, our specialists have developed a taxonomy – specific manufacturing and industrial search terms – that is tailored for UK industry, providing far greater and more accurate insight into companies and the services they provide.
You can register for the UK Supply Chain Directory, and claim your company’s profile, here: https://uksupplychaindirectory.com/
