With CityFibre’s full-fibre gigabit infrastructure set to reach nearly every home and business premises in the city, there’s huge potential for businesses to take advantage of smart technologies to improve productivity, efficiency, sustainability, and profit margins.

Opportunity Peterborough has excellent relationships with a number of universities, research institutes and consultancies and can introduce you to the most relevant organisations to help you reach the next stage of evolution.

From local professional service providers like accountants, solicitors, and property professionals, through to innovation funds, and collaborative partnerships to develop new technologies, we’re here to help and will have the contacts to support your business.

Grants and Investment

Click here to see our innovation, sustainability and productivity grants and investment schemes page.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) is a UK-wide programme enabling businesses to improve their competitiveness, productivity and performance.

KTPs form a partnership between your business and an academic institution – a university, further education college or research and technology organisation – allowing you to access skills and expertise to help your business develop.

The knowledge sought is embedded into the business from the institution through a project, or projects, undertaken by a recently qualified student, recruited to specifically work on that project. KTPs can vary in length from 6 months to three years, depending on the needs of the business and the desired outcomes.

A KTP is part-funded by a government grant. A small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) would be expected to contribute about a third of the costs involved in the project – the average annual contribution to a project for an SME would be around £20,000. This contributes to the costs of the institution’s supervisor and towards the student’s employment and development. Your contribution to the costs of the project provides the services of your KTP student, the time and expertise of the academics or researchers working with you, and, in the case of a long-term strategic KTP, expert guidance from a KTP Adviser.

If you think a KTP could benefit your business and you’d like to find out more then contact Opportunity Peterborough.

Operational Efficiency

Increases in profitability don’t have to come from increases in sales. Improvements in operational efficiency can lead to increased productivity and cost savings that improve the bottom line. There a number of ways to improve operational efficiency:

• Leveraging technology – enabling mobile workers, taking advantage of Peterborough’s gigabit speed internet network to utilise cloud computing services, improving automation and investing in more efficient machinery can all help to deliver benefits to your business.After putting together usage cases with the Future Peterborough team (run by Opportunity Peterborough and Peterborough City Council), social housing provider, Cross Keys Homes, is running an Internet of Things trial in partnership with gigabit fibre provider, CityFibre and Comms365. State-of-the-art sensors are helping improve residents’ wellbeing, reduce costs and improve safety by monitoring humidity, condensation, wasted heat, noise levels and problem parking.

  The GrowIN4.0 project is helping SME manufacturers to identify the emerging technologies which will create the biggest positive impact on their productivity and carbon footprint, as well as how to use them most effectively and integrate them easily into their current operations. You can read more about the project here.

• Resource efficiency – producing more with less, reducing power costs and finding a market for your waste are just some of the ways to reduce costs. Peterborough has a whole host of organisations engaged in its circular economy programme, Circular Peterborough. The initiative aims to help businesses eliminate all forms of waste and get maximum value from their resources so they cut costs and limit environmental impact. Participation is free of charge. To find out more, contact Opportunity Peterborough.One of Peterborough’s largest manufacturers, Perkins, advocates for remanufacturing, a significant part of circular economy. A remanufactured component can can result in 70% less waste production and 80% less energy usage – savings that can be passed on to customers.

   

• Process efficiency – analysing existing processes and removing wasteful steps, better aligning workloads, standardising processes, re-organising workspace, and creating benchmarks and metrics can all help to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and improve competitiveness.
• Supply chain management – working with your suppliers and customers to optimise efficiencies within the supply chain can deliver huge cost savings. So too can the promotion of innovation within existing supply chains and the identification of new suppliers with innovative new products and materials.

Regulatory Advice

• Better Business For All: Better Business for All (BBfA) is a national partnership between business and  regulatory bodies. It aims to help businesses improve and simplify how they deliver on regulatory compliance. The BBfA partnership can help any business, but is specifically designed to help start-up, SME and local growing businesses to understand and implement regulation. Click here to find out which organisations who can offer you support to meet regulatory requirements.

For more information on any of the areas covered on this page, or to request an introduction to organisations that are best able to meet your requirements, contact us