Birmingham City University’s Business School and the Department for Digital Transformation in the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment (CEBE), have embarked on a major new project to develop an Adaptive Intelligent System for a Vehicle Movement company, to optimise scheduling and make better use of suppliers. It is hoped this innovative Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project will improve business efficiency by increasing orders, delivering greater profits and widening the range of services the company can offer.

Engineius is the trading name of Vehicle Movement Exchange UK Ltd, whose mission is to ‘make vehicle movement easy’. To do this, they designed and launched an “on-demand” service for moving vehicles across the UK. Since launch in April 2018, Engineius has acquired over 70 fleet customers across all major sectors, and today moves some 70,000 vehicles each year.

The University successfully applied to take part in a Management Knowledge Transfer Partnership (mKTP) funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) via Innovate UK.

The 24-month mKTP project will see staff from BCU guide the company in developing and implementing a digital transformation strategy to achieve end-to-end process improvement, transforming service provision. This will involve:

• Analysis of the current business model and the skills of the schedulers
• Designing Engineius Integrated Technology Platform (EITP) AI architecture
• EITP development, testing and deployment
• Training Engineius staff and embedding knowledge
• Researching novel applications of AI to solve optimisation problems in transportation.

The mKTP builds on current work in the Department for Digital Transformation to develop strategies and toolkits for digital transformation in SMEs, supporting the continuous improvement needed for the development of SMEs at different stages of digital maturity.

Engineius Chief Executive Officer Chris Clibbery said: “We currently move tens of thousands of vehicles each year; our vision is to move millions. We are delighted to be part of the Management Knowledge Transfer Partnership and working with the experienced team at BCU as we execute our roadmap of digital transformation to make this happen.

“Digital transformation is certainly at the heart of our offering, optimising a truly on-demand service, designed to be comprehensive, instant and transparent.  We are excited at the prospect as we embark on a 24-month journey to support our mission to make vehicle movement easy and we see our mKTP Associate supported by the University as integral to our vision.”

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships is a UK-wide programme that has been helping businesses for the past 40 years to improve their competitiveness and productivity through the better use of knowledge, technology and skills that reside within the UK Knowledge Base.

In a KTP or mKTP, the University employs a graduate or postgraduate (the Associate) to work on site with the company, jointly supervised by company and university staff. BCU’s growing portfolio of projects is fully supported by the Knowledge Transfer team in RIEE.

For this project, the mKTP Associate will be supported by Academic Supervisor Dr Shishank Shishank, who has industrial and academic experience in the systems approach to management, decision-making, process mapping and business process transformation.  He has worked extensively with senior management of businesses throughout the UK on a range of innovation projects.

The Lead Academic for the project is Emmett Cooper, Assistant Lecturer in Computer Science and Data Science in CEBE. Emmett’s research interests relate to the use of Machine Learning and Data Science techniques to provide innovative solutions to problems in academia and industry. This has led to a PhD that investigates the application of Data Science and Machine Learning techniques to the labour market.

Interested in digital technology? Find out more about Knowledge Transfer Partnerships and how your business can benefit from engaging with our KTP team and Birmingham City University academic expertise.