‍Working with Edge Digital Manufacturing, the team of Data Scientists at the Hartree Centre North East Hub developed an AI-driven maturity recommendation engine to replace resource-intensive manual processes to allow experts to support more manufacturers.

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Challenge

EDGE Digital Manufacturing’s Digital Readiness diagnostic was already used by 1000+ SMEs including through the Made Smarter programme, but the process alongside it was entirely manual. After each assessment, expert consultants spent hours reviewing notes and qualitative responses to produce personalised digital roadmaps. This created inconsistency between advisors, turnaround times of up to two weeks, and a hard ceiling on how many manufacturers advisors could realistically support. EDGE Digital Manufacturing was exploring how artificial intelligence could streamline this process and approached Data Scientists at the Hartree Centre North East Hub to help with this issue.

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Approach

The twelve-week project addressed the challenges by replacing manual expert review with a Large Language Model-powered analysis engine, configured to score qualitative SME responses across multiple sub-topics and extract supporting evidence for each recommendation. Data Scientists also built a fully JSON-configurable architecture so that the system can be scaled easily.  

From there, the team were able to start developing a maturity-based recommendation engine that categorises each SME and prioritises guidance based on their current capability level. This platform was developed as an MVP-ready application on the cloud, with multi-user authentication, persistent session storage, and a complete audit trail. Then, the team proceeded to validate the system against five real expert-led assessments, achieving over 73% alignment on maturity stage determination.  

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Benefits

The AI-driven platform transformed a resource-intensive manual process into a scalable, consistent assessment tool. Once fully deployed, assessment-to-roadmap delivery will be cut to under a few hours, SMEs will receive immediate, on-demand and evidence-backed guidance tailored to their maturity level, and EDGE Digital will be able to serve significantly more manufacturers without a proportional increase in consultant time.

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“Working with the Hartree Centre North East Hub has been such a valuable experience. Akash and the team have been flexible, knowledgeable, supportive, and now we have a tool that we can begin to use.”

"This platform proves that AI can genuinely enhance expert-driven processes without replacing them. By encoding EDGE's domain knowledge into a configurable system, we've turned a weeks-long manual assessment into an intelligent, scalable tool that delivers roadmap, and it's ready to be tested with manufacturers across the UK."

‍- Ravi Gidoomal, Edge Digital Manufacturing

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Further Information

This work was completed as part of one of our collaborative data projects. The projects are up to 12 weeks in duration and give you access to a wide range of expertise across our team of data scientists and data engineers. We will work alongside your team to scope your data science or engineering project, build a prototype solution, and explore options to deploy it within your organisation. You can learn more about them on our webpage here.

If you would like to learn more about the Hartree Centre North East Hub or our collaborative data projects, please get in touch with us at: hello@hartreenortheast.uk

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