NGen funds development of supply chain crisis management platform

Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen), the organization behind Canada’s Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster, has announced $8 million in collaborative funding for a project led by Canadian technology company ThinkData Works Inc. in partnership with Palantir Technologies Canada and auto parts leader Martinrea International to address the urgent supply chain crisis impacting manufacturers and consumers worldwide.

The three Canadian firms will collaborate to develop and launch a Supply Chain Resiliency Platform intended to enable organizations create a digital representation of their supply chain, combined with global supply chain events data and alternative-supplier catalogues from ThinkData’s External Data Management Software.

The platform will also enable a centralized overview of Martinrea’s supply chain operations, prediction of and alerting to potentially disruptive events, recommended mitigation actions and ultimately prevent production delays. In addition, the platform will leverage Palantir’s Foundry application-building tools to enable rapid prototyping and innovation to help manufacturers solve challenges as they arise.

“We [ThinkData, Martinrea, and Palantir] want to transform the way manufacturing companies operate by making it possible for them to not only react better and faster to global events that impact the supply chain, but to begin to predict these types of events before they even happen,” said Bryan Smith, CEO, ThinkData. “The value manufacturers and supply chain-dependent businesses will unlock through this solution will be life-altering – using AI to analyze your complex supply chain alongside global events data through this solution will make organizations feel as though they took the red pill in the Matrix. They will wake up with a much deeper knowledge and understanding than they ever thought was possible”.

The partnering companies say they will make the platform available to all Canadian manufacturers, to leverage the underlying data to develop, test and deploy applications and AI models to be shared or monetized within the industry.

This project is funded by NGen under Canada’s Innovation Supercluster Initiative. To date, NGen has approved 135 projects with 306 industry partners, investing $209.8 million of Supercluster funding and leveraging $515 million in total project investment.
www.palantir.com
www.thinkdataworks.com
www.martinrea.com
www.ngen.ca