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1.2M European Funding for University of Warwick’s New E-Marketing for Engineering SMES Project

Originally Published 23 April 2002

The Government Office for the West Midlands has just announced that The University of Warwick?s Warwick Manufacturing Group, has won £1,199,919 in European Funding to establish an E-business Collaborative Marketplace for the region's Engineering small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

The three year project to develop an E-Marketplace will provide a platform to enable over 500 engineering companies in the West Midlands to move from Fax Business to E-Business quickly, easily and at low cost.

The electronic collaborative marketplace will allow SMEs to bid for a greater variety of business, from virtual organisation to tackle new products or markets, lower transaction costs through internet enabled communication and reduce the cost of non-direct purchases through marketplace aggregation of volume.

Dr Jay Bal, Director of the InterLean Centre and a Principal Research Fellow in the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) at the University said:

"The Marketplace will provide electronic tools to raise electronic Requests for Information and Quotes , run electronic auctions and form collaborative project teams with other SME partners to address new opportunities. This funding is important in providing a platform to enable our regions SMEs to exploit E-Business, to help retain business that might be transferred to other low cost parts of the world and through collaboration, extend the scope and the quality of the products manufactured in the region. The money will be spent on building an innovative platform for achieving this, and training SMEs to exploit it".

For further details contact:

Nick Matthews, Warwick Manufacturing Group

University of Warwick Tel: 024 76 572506

Dhiren Katwa, Government Office for The West Midlands 0121 626 2024.

Areas to benefit from the current programme, which runs until 2006, include much of the West Midlands conurbation, the North Staffordshire conurbation, some former coalfield areas of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, and the more deprived rural areas in Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire and Staffordshire.