Case Study

How we helped create an ecosystem of innovative defence suppliers

Working in partnership with SimplyDo enabled Rolls-Royce Defence to identify, qualify and engage innovative organisations.

7000+

Suppliers scouted across 4 innovation challenges in 12 months

65

Suppliers engaged in 12 months

13

Suppliers progressed in 12 months

Working with SimplyDo enables businesses from across the world to share their innovative capabilities aligned to our current and future programme challenges.

Dan Gillians, Innovation Technology Lead, Rolls-Royce Defence

Background:

Connecting Innovative suppliers with defence challenges

Summary:

1

Rolls-Royce Defence are world-leading innovators

2

Defence is a highly regulated industry and is complex for new suppliers

3

Scouting and engaging new organisations carried significant administrative and time burden

Rolls-Royce Defence sits at the centre of the UK's defence, aviation and aerospace ecosystem, at the forefront of cutting-edge technological innovation. This means that Rolls-Royce Defence requires access to the newest and best research partners and suppliers from across the world.

Bringing new technologies into this highly regulated environment was previously very complex and required the highest levels of quality and safety. This presented challenges when bringing new and novel suppliers into the highly specialised arena of defence.

Adding to this complexity were the existing innovation scouting processes, which were time-consuming and carried a heavy administrative strain for innovation staff.

Solution:

Driving quality and visibility into industry innovation

Summary:

1

Process: Worked together to co-create a procedure for finding, checking and highlighting new suppliers

2

People: Took on the heavy lifting and administration of seeking and engaging the market

3

Product: Utilised platform to support gathering supplier ideas and assess them through to implementation

SimplyDo worked with Rolls-Royce Defence to design and align a process to find, check and present new suppliers. Our platform's unique ability to search over 357m businesses, by capability, allowed them to easily explore sectors and suppliers.

SimplyDo’s expert staff then took on the administrative heavy lifting by filtering and qualifying thousands of organisations. Our proven engagement and qualification techniques were then used to attract and sign up targeted suppliers.

The platform also supported the capturing of ideas and provided automated company due diligence. Simple assessment and tracking features allowed Rolls-Royce Defence to manage new innovation into operation.

Impact:

Driving innovative technologies into operational deployment

Summary:

1

Increased international reach to find the most innovative organisations

2

Increased quality of innovative suppliers

3

Reduced time spent on finding new solution providers

Using SimplyDo’s approach enabled Rolls-Royce Defence to increase the international reach of suppliers engaged by 75%. Signing-up organisations across Europe, Asia and the Americas delivered diverse innovation solutions.

Our proven approach to targeted engagement allowed us to take on the heavy lifting of contacting and qualifying organisations. This led to a 77% increase in the quality of innovative suppliers.

The solution allowed Rolls-Royce Defence engineers to reduce the time spent on finding and qualifying innovative suppliers by 87%. This allowed them to spend more time working on new technology solutions, rather than on administrative and commercial issues.