The Intelligent Predictive Analytics for Commodities (IPAC) Project will demonstrate a firstto- market prediction-based data analytics capability for the managing of procurement purchases with insight on the source prices of commodities and raw materials. This will be achieved by applying novel data mining techniques to an extensive archive of commodities prices and contextual data to establish trend characteristics. A key capability will be the price prediction for combinations of commodities and raw materials to identify the lowest, combined price. The innovation in the IPAC Project is based on unique: a) Trend-based data analytics to provide accurate and timely predictions on the expected variations of the prices of commodities and raw materials; b) ‘What If …’ analysis capability from the aggregation of information from a significant data archive with live information on prices combined with a probabilistic based prediction capability; c) Visualisation algorithms that process the output from the predictive trend algorithms and render the information in forms that can be easily manipulated by a user to enable useful ‘What if…’ analyses. A recent state-of-the-art product evaluation has shown there is no other commercial solution providing a predictive-based pricing of commodities and raw materials. The benefits for users therefore are: a) Improved understanding of commodities and raw materials prices enabling subscribers to significantly decrease their procurements costs; b) Subscribers will be able to undertake more sophisticated price analysis strategies by identifying the consequences of combinations of aggregated commodity and raw materials combinations. This will enable better planning of procurement activities. The key outcome will be a prototype demonstrator produced and evaluated to confirm the approach and to ensure the required predictive functionality and performance is achieved. Economic benefit to both subscribers and consumers should follow.

For the past 30 years Mintec has been the leading independent source of pricing information for commodities and raw materials, supporting leading manufacturers, retailers and traders with statistical information and expert market analysis. The current Mintec Datagain product enables supply chain professionals to track factors affecting the commodity pricing and to make informed decisions on the timing and extent of purchasing contracts.Increasingly as Mintec attempts to capture business outside the UK for Datagain on our hosted platform, prospective customers are asking for more and more details relating to IT security policies, security model and concepts, data protection and other questions We would like to audit, test, secure and document our systems to ensure that we can answer the questions of our prospective customers and thereby assist us in winning more non-UK business.