How the University of Southampton mapped maritime supply chains with The Data City

The Solent is a hotspot for maritime activity in the UK, being a hotspot for many key verticals such as Marine Engineering and Navel Architecture, Naval Defence, and Aquaculture.  

Tom Carnay is the Innovation Programme Lead at the University of Southampton. In this role, he specialises in creating business cases for innovative ventures. When looking at the Maritime sector in the Solent, he noticed that SIC codes were not capturing all the companies he would expect to see (especially when looking at supply chain companies). 

Having heard about The Data City in his previous role at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), he decided to sign up for a free trial and use our AI classification tool to map the maritime industry in real-time. 

Tom took a very independent approach to using the platform, wanting to fully understand its intricacies to map his own sectors. 

To help achieve this goal, our Consultant, Fatima supported Tom on his journey. This included not only various calls discussing taxonomies, verticals and much more, but also completing our accreditation programme. 

Now Tom has the skills to map his own sectors. This involves ‘slicing’ the sector up into the correct verticals, creating a fitting taxonomy and then executing building the sector on the platform. 

Tom now confidently maps sectors independently after collaborating closely with The Data City team. With our assistance, he successfully mapped the Maritime industry and handled Semi-conductors on his own. 

This sector mapping has helped justify grants at the University of Southampton and supports various internal processes. 

The Data City platform has also proved invaluable when it comes to exporting lists and accessing the row-level data. This allows the data to be enriched from other sources and can be used for bespoke analysis such as heatmaps.  

Integrating Innovate UK data was particularly valuable. Overlaying RTICs onto Innovate UK funding data revealed the University of Southampton’s strong connectivity and funding in the maritime sector. 

The platform’s real-time updates and unlimited access allow Tom to confidently map new sectors and keep existing maps current, unlike static data cuts that quickly become outdated.