INSIGHTS / News

SETsquared Scale-Up Programme members Claritum, together with the University of Southampton, has secured an Impact Acceleration Award following a referral from the Scale-Up Programme. The Impact Acceleration Award is focused on using AI Data Analytics to identify issues, gain better spend visibility and make faster business decisions.

Claritum’s eProcurement solution streamlines the procurement process. It enables employees to purchase goods through catalogues easily, whilst at the same time providing the tools for procurement to efficiently and effectively manage suppliers into the catalogue, analyse and optimise the cost of goods and services and apply governance to the overall process. Claritum joined the SETsquared Scale-Up Programme in February 2018 with a view to growing the business.

Through an event at the University of Southampton – a Next Generation Services Sector scoping event – run by the University’s ESRC Impact Acceleration Account Team under the theme of the Government’s Industrial Strategy AI and the Data Economy Grand Challenge, Claritum’s CTO Paul Barker was introduced to academics offering the skills required for them to make a joint bid for this Impact Acceleration Award.

The seed funding was provided by “University of Southampton’s Impact Acceleration Account from the Economic and Social Research Council”.

Claritum will benefit from the research insight of the University of Southampton Business School applied to advance its analytics offering focused on business efficiency. Researchers, in the Business School, will benefit from a funding boost on using AI, Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics to procurement processes, thanks to this Impact Acceleration award.

Tahir M Nisar PhD, Southampton Business School, said:

“This award will enable the world-leading research being conducted at the University to make a real difference in addressing some of the major challenges facing Procurement groups.”

He added, “The research team will be looking to achieve a step-change – giving researchers access to Claritum’s extensive knowledge base and the tools and inspiration to make important contributions towards Procurement data analytics.”

“We’re very proud to have been successful in obtaining this award,” said Prof. Rick Hillum, Executive Chairman at Claritum. “We have ambitious plans for taking our AI and Data Analytics capabilities forward, with further real-world practical business applications. Southampton’s Business School can help us to achieve this.”

Commenting on the Scale-Up Programme, Prof. Hillum added:

“It was as a direct result of the Scale-Up Programme, including the guidance and facilitation of the SETsquared team, that has led to us achieving this success. The SETsquared Scale-Up Programme is a fantastic thing for SMEs. Too often, SMEs are focussed on their core business of delivering to their customers, and don’t have the resources to grow their businesses at the same time. The Scale-Up Programme is ideally placed to facilitate the conversations and partnerships that SMEs so desperately need to achieve their growth goals.”

“As well as the Impact Acceleration Award we have also been working with the Scale-Up Programme team on a KTP. SETsquared provided invaluable guidance, expert grant writers and the connection to academics at The University of Bristol. We are awaiting the results of that application and hope to add it to our list of successes very soon.”