Applicable across the process industries, most especially in core sectors like Pharmaceuticals, Fine Chemicals, Catalysis and Flavours and Fragrances, the Britest Tools have been well proven in all sorts of processes, but we continue to push the boundaries.

The focus has frequently been upon process improvement and cost reduction efforts such as de-bottlenecking and quality improvement, but our reach now extends into probing aspects such optimizing process changeovers and line stops, and visually understanding the relationships between critical to quality attributes on the one hand and process feedstocks and in-process controls and conditions on the other, the approach we term 'Property Mapping'.

Biotechnology offers new and exciting possibilities in cleaner, less impactful processes to obtain highly functional and valuable products which are often simply not accessible by conventional chemical routes. Biocatalysis, bioprocesses, and sustainable biofeedstocks obtained from plant-based and waste resources can be variously used to produce or modify speciality chemicals, advanced materials, and new medicines, and in routes to clean, green energy.

Many bioprocess innovations however face significant challenges on the way to achieving widespread adoption and critical scale. The gaps from successful proof of concept in the lab to demonstration and then commercialisation can be intimidating and leave entrepreneurs struggling to provider potential investors with robust evidence of commercial process capability and costs.

Digitalisation (as opposed to straightforward 'digitisation' of data records) is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business. The chemicals and chemical-using industries are in the midst of a profound change with respect to digitalisation, but this is a process not an event.

Britest has demonstrated in collaboration with the pharmaceuticals industry how our approach can be applied to to enhancing advanced, data driven process design, modelling and control strategies through its abilities to generate mechanistic understanding of physical, chemical and biochemical processes. The opportunities include

The transition to a circular economy is a cornerstone of national and international responses to the threat of climate change and the ambition to establish a fair, sustainable, and prosperous future. The EU's Circular Economy Action Plan is one of the main building blocks of the European Green Deal, Europe’s new agenda for sustainable growth. The transition to a circular economy will reduce pressure on natural resources, create sustainable growth and jobs, and is seen as a prerequisite to achieve the EU’s 2050 climate neutrality target and to halt biodiversity loss.

We continue to expand and enhance the capacity of the Britest toolkit to deal with the "big picture" thinking required to understand value flows in the circular economy, for example introducing the concept of the Supply Chain Definition Diagram to visualise often complex interrelations and dependencies across time and space.