About

Supply chain management is pervasive and touches every aspect of our lives. The impact of buy-one-get-one-free deals on food waste, automotive industry product recalls, horse meat in ready-meals and queues in accident and emergency departments. These are all supply chain issues. These are the sort of real world problems, which our Supply Chain and Operations research team seek to address.

Profile

Working directly with our industrial partners we adopt a problem-centred approach to our research, to bring academic rigour to the resolution of complex business and organisational problems. We seek to engage aspiring organisations where our research ideas and innovation can be tested and best applied to generate economic and societal value. As a result we work across a wide range of sectors including agrochemicals, automotive, defence, consumer-packaged goods, retail and pharmaceuticals using supply chain strategy as a lever for business transformation.

We engage across sectors and disciplines through our Supply Chain in Practice (SCiP) network, to embed and develop customer responsive supply chain theory into practical solutions and demonstrable returns. Members of the SCiP Collaborators Forum and attendees at SCiP networking events, actively participate in improving supply chain management; sharing promising practices and combining experience to more effectively leverage your supply chain to create and sustain competitive advantage. We have also recently launched a free online course hosted by Future Learn, aimed at giving learners an understanding of the world of supply chains and their management.

We work collaboratively with other research groups in WMG:

• Intelligent Vehicles Group
• Cyber Security Centre 
• Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Group
• Steels Processing Group

Research Areas

Current research areas include:

• Customer responsive supply chains – developing a new generation of business models that harness the potential of the internet; where consumers are customisers, retailers are virtual brokers and demand is fulfilled through a localised distributed manufacturing and logistics network
• Right-shoring – the strategic positioning of supply chain assets (supply, manufacturing and logistics) locally, regionally and globally to support business strategy
• Circular business models – value retention across a value network to enable products that are commercially unviable using traditional business models (e.g. fuel cells) to become viable
• Data driven decision making – to improve business decision making, turning the opportunity presented by ‘big-data’ into commercial success
• Supply network structures – empirically assessing the performance of vertically integrated, networked and coopetitive (hybrid) market structures to improve competitiveness

Media and Press

See WMG News and WMG in the Media for additional press coverage.

Academic Staff
Professor Janet Godsell
Dr Donato Masi
Dr Jeffrey Jones
Dr Kogila Balakrishnan
Dr Dawei Lu

All group members

Enquiries

Vivenne Tsimbili

Vacancies

Working with business through
Supply Chains in Practice

WMG centre HVM Catapult