Derby business intelligence firm teams up with University of Nottingham

Derby-based business intelligence solutions specialist PXtech has joined forces with the University of Nottingham in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) as the business looks to boost its turnover and make itself more competitive on the global market.

KTP is a part government-funded programme to encourage collaboration between businesses and universities. Operated by Innovate UK, it was originally launched in 2003, replacing the Teaching Company Scheme (TCS).

The scheme is designed to facilitate the transfer of knowledge, innovation and technology from leading research institutions, such as the University of Nottingham, and corporations with the aim of improving business activities and growing the UK economy.

The KTP project team comprises three researchers at the University of Nottingham, Ralph Cooper head of software development at PXtech, and Adrian Howlett technical director at PXtech. Ning Xue also joins the team as KTP associate, with the responsibility for driving the project and facilitating the transfer of skills and knowledge from the university to PXtech.

PXtech has announced plans to grow the business significantly by 2020 and anticipates that the three-year partnership will play a substantial part in reaching this target.

Cooper said: “Our current products are great at helping our customers understand what is happening right now in their business, particularly in the hospitality and retail markets. We want to build upon this platform to go beyond what has happened and what is happening now, and start to try and make predictions about what will happen in future under certain conditions.

“Through the KTP project, we hope to develop predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities into Axent, particularly around staff scheduling, helping store managers create better, more efficient schedules, more easily.

“We believe this project and the future relationship with the team at the University of Nottingham presents a fantastic opportunity for PXtech and our customers to be at the forefront of innovation in this industry.”

Dario Landa-Silva, associate professor in computer science at the University of Nottingham said: “This KTP project is an exciting opportunity to combine the research expertise from the academic team with the experience of business intelligence from PXtech in order to develop advanced analytics capability for the hospitality and retail sectors. The academic team will provide expertise on big-data mining, machine learning and optimisation while PXtech will provide data and knowledge of the operational environment.

“The aim is to develop optimisation software for staff scheduling and inventory management that is also enhanced with accurate descriptive analysis of historical data and sound predictions (e.g. sales) of the operational environment. Ultimately, this will translate into prescriptive capability for Axent to suggest how to do things better and more efficiently.

“As researchers, we are very excited by the challenges and opportunities that this KTP presents for combining big-data mining, machine learning and optimisation in a practical setting. We are confident that this project will not only allow us to apply our expertise in these areas but also to develop new ideas and techniques.”