Tag: research

Twenty years ago, through the exceptional generosity of the McDonnell Douglas Foundation, The Boeing Center for Technology, Information, and Manufacturing was endowed in the Olin Business School. Since then, we have served as a powerful catalyst for technology-driven innovation, process optimization, risk management, and global supply chain excellence.

In honor of our 20th anniversary, and to more accurately reflect our focus, we adopted a new look and changed our name to The Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation. And with a renewed vigor, we completed the most successful year in our history. Not only did we work on a record number of corporate projects, but we also hosted several events featuring exceptional speakers and supported research on a number of cutting-edge topics.

This spring, we welcomed Mike Pinedo, the Julius Schlesinger Professor of Operations Management at New York University, to talk about operational risk management in the service industry at our 13th annual Meir Rosenblatt memorial lecture. And we welcomed John Stroup, President and CEO of Belden Inc., to share his perspectives on Industry 4.0 and the emerging technologies that will impact the manufacturing industry and beyond. Both presentations were intellectually stimulating and thought provoking.

We also held our inaugural project competition and awards ceremony, the Project of the Year Symposium, which highlighted our top five corporate projects from the 2016-2017 academic year. The Symposium featured presentations from our student teams that worked on projects for Anheuser-Busch InBev, Belden, Boeing, Emerson, and Monsanto. The teams competed for awards in “Project of the Year,” “Greatest Immediate Business Impact,” and “Presentation Excellence,” and split a $10,500 prize pool. A summary of all our spring projects can be found below.

Our 3rd annual Supply Chain Finance & Risk Management Conference took place on May 14-15. The aim of the conference, which was attended by prominent academic researchers from top business schools from around the world, was to stimulate interactions and knowledge sharing at the interface of operations and finance, and supply chain risk management. The conference featured presentations based on current research trends, including real operations and risk management, crowd funding, finance, trade credit, and hedging. There was also a panel discussion on emerging themes and directions of the field.  One of the initiatives resulting from the conference will be an edited book, comprised of short papers submitted by attendees, to be published this fall as an issue in the Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management book series.

We would also like to share with you some of the corporate projects The Boeing Center and student teams have led for our corporate clients this year.

Lastly, we would like to thank all of our corporate member companies for providing us with the opportunity to offer valuable experiential learning to our students, who dedicated long hours to ensure delivery of insightful and impactful supply chain solutions. We hope you all had an awesome summer, and we look forward to working with you again soon!

Learn more about sponsored projects and membership through The Boeing Center.

Anheuser-Busch InBev

This project revolved around optimizing the inventory mix at distribution centers for some of ABI’s craft beer products, particularly Stella Artois. The team utilized mathematical models with the potential to reduce accessorial costs and increase product freshness. Student team:  Miles Bolinger, Sam Huo, Huyen Nguyen, Roberto Ortiz, and Jon Slack.

Belden

The team working on this project used the QR inventory modeling approach to identify opportunities and costs for improving service levels at PPC, a Belden subsidiary in Syracuse, NY.  Student team:  Bonnie Bao, Michael Stein, Yuying Wang, and Yuyao Zhu.

Boeing

The goal of this project was to determine the most influential order and part characteristics affecting on-time delivery statistics of Boeing’s transactional spare parts business.  Student team:  Vineet Chauhan, Phil Goetz, Brian Liu, Sontaya Sherrell, and Fan Zhang.

Edward Jones

The team’s objective was to analyze the technology deployment process at Edward Jones. They did this by conducting interviews and collecting survey data to run a capacity analysis and generate a personnel network diagram.  Student team:  Huang Deng, Wyatt Gutierrez, Cynthia Huang, Drew Ruchte, and Jamie Yue.

Emerson

The Emerson project team worked with ProTeam’s Richmond Hill facility to determine the optimal product mix, optimize inventory management of stock, and develop a data analysis model to facilitate future upkeep of the system.  Student team:  Kushal Chawla, Serena Chen, Kai Ji, Jeffrey Lantz, and Zoe Zhao.

Express Scripts

The purpose of this project was to optimize Express Scripts’ distribution network by considering logistics costs, formulary configuration, and inventory vs. service levels.  Student team:  Himanshu Aggarwal, Jinsoo Chang, and Janet Qian.

MilliporeSigma

In this project, the team worked with MilliporeSigma’s facility in Temecula, CA to develop a model to help determine the economic production quantity for each SKU based on customer demand, production cost, inventory value, and shelf life.  Student team:  Perri Goldberg, Youngho Kim, Ayshwarya Rangarajan, Prateek Sureka, and Flora Teng.

Monsanto

The objective of this project was to understand, define, and map out the credit processes within Monsanto.  Student team:  Hai Cao, Yanyan Li, Ashwin Kumar, Jonathan Neff, Tom Siepman, and Xukun Zan.

West Pharmaceutical Services

This project sought to accurately compute the approximate safety stock levels, reorder points, and replenishment quantities at West Pharma’s Kinston plant using a continuous review model.  Student team:  Matthew Drory, Rohan Kamalia, Mrigank Kanoi, Ray Tang, and Jiani Zhai.

For more supply chain digital content and cutting-edge research, check us out on the socials [@theboeingcenter] and our website [olin.wustl.edu/bcsci]

• • •

A Boeing Center digital production

Supply Chain  //  Operational Excellence  //  Risk Management

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Operational risk can have a crippling effect on a company if not managed properly. This is especially true in the financial services industry. Banks and investment firms must pay close attention to variables that have the potential to impact their operations, not only from the breakdown of technology and processes, but also from a personnel perspective. The responsibility of managing one’s money is great, and the inability to properly anticipate and manage potential risk factors can have a devastating effect, all the way up to the industry level. A case in point was the subprime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s, which led to a nationwide economic recession.

Mike Pinedo, the Julius Schlesinger Professor of Operations Management at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is an expert in risk management research, particularly in the context of the financial services industry. In his presentation at The Boeing Center’s 13th annual Meir Rosenblatt Memorial Lecture, he described the main types of primary risks in a financial services company: market risk, credit risk, and operational risk. Ops risk, which is the risk of a loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people, or external events, may be the most important factor, he claimed.

Pinedo goes on to describe various types of operational costs such as human resources, I.T. investments, and insurance costs, and how they impact corporate risk management. For example, rogue traders can pose a risk if they make inadvisable decisions, so some investment firms choose to take out insurance against that possibility. Other types of ops risk include transaction errors, loss of or damage to assets, theft, and fraud, all of which can pose a catastrophic risk at the industry level. Pinedo adeptly inserted anecdotes into his lecture to provide examples of these risk factors playing out in the real world.

The annual Meir J. Rosenblatt Memorial Lecture brings the “rock stars” of supply chain and operations to the Danforth Campus every fall. Each lecture gives prominent thinkers and practitioners alike the opportunity to hear an expert in the field highlight emerging trends.

This lecture series was established in 2003 to honor the memory of Meir J. Rosenblatt, who taught from 1987 to 2001 at Olin Business School as the Myron Northrop Distinguished Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management. A leader among faculty, Rosenblatt often won the Teacher of the Year award at Olin and authored the book “Five Times and Still Kicking: A Life with Cancer,” having battled cancer multiple times throughout his life.

For more supply chain digital content and cutting-edge research, check us out on the socials [@theboeingcenter] and our website [olin.wustl.edu/bcsci]

• • •

A Boeing Center digital production

Supply Chain  //  Operational Excellence  //  Risk Management

Website  • LinkedIn  • Subscribe  • Facebook  • Instagram  • Twitter  • YouTube

The Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation presents…an interview with Professor Panos Kouvelis, Emerson Distinguished Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management and Director of The Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation at Washington University in St. Louis, about the Global Supply Chain Benchmark Study, a collaborative research initiative of faculty at leading business schools including Olin. Below is an excerpt of the report; for the complete report, go here → http://bit.ly/GSCBS2016

BACKGROUND

“For the past 25 years manufacturing offshoring to low-cost locations like China has been the dominant strategy for many western manufacturing companies. This has led to a significant reduction of manufacturing jobs in developed economies. Recently, many manufacturers have reported they plan to bring back at least a part of their global production volume to developed countries. General Electric, for example, announced in 2012 they would relocate manufacturing and R&D of their household appliances business, which had previously been offshored to China and Mexico, to Louisville, KY in the USA.1 Similarly, Plantronics, a U.S. based manufacturer of headphones, shifted production volume back from China to Mexico.2 At the same time companies from perceived low-cost countries have reported investments in manufacturing capacity in developed economies. For instance, the Chinese company Lenovo recently brought back the production of personal computers to North America.

While there seems to be an emerging trend to reshore production, traditional offshoring to developing economies continues to be a viable phenomenon. For example, General Motors recently announced a USD 12bn investment in new plants in China.4 These examples offer just a glimpse of the magnitude of manufacturing location decisions companies are currently making in a wave of restructuring of their global supply chains.”

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

“Despite the growing attention in the business press to reports of companies relocating manufacturing to western countries, there is very little empirical research on the scale of such decisions, their drivers and their impact. Hence, in this study we investigate current trends in production sourcing. Based on a survey of 74 leading manufacturing companies predominantly from North America, Europe and Japan we shed some light on (1) what production sourcing decisions are currently being made, (2) what drives these decisions and (3) what results do they lead to.

Our research suggests that there is a significant wave of restructuring of global supply chains in progress. Companies de- and increase production volume all over the globe as shown in the overview presented in Exhibit 1. However, we did not observe a dominant strategy for sourcing production volume. Companies make different decisions for a variety of reasons. While China continues to be the most attractive country for manufacturing, many companies reported following (also) other strategies. Moreover, we see that decision making has evolved from simple cost comparisons to more complex trade-offs between a magnitude of factors that are deemed important, i.e., across quality, market access and risk. Based on these and other reported drivers we see a shift of production not only to China but also to Eastern Europe and the ASEAN countries which are being used as nearshore sources of production for Western European and Chinese markets respectively.

For North America we see evidence for a return of manufacturing. It is not a strong trend but in our sample more companies report shifting production volume to North America rather than offshoring to other countries. This pattern is not consistent with the much cited reshoring trend predicted by many business and political commentators. The movement we observed is not driven by the reshoring of American firms but rather by European and Asian firms offshoring who account for 60% of the production volume increase in North America. While this is good news for manufacturing in North America, the indicators for the future of manufacturing in Western Europe appear to be less bright. Indeed, Western Europe is one of only two regions for which our sample reports a net decrease of production volume. Companies reported offshoring for a variety of reasons including shifting to either less costly locations or to places closer to market demand.

Despite the decline in production volume in certain regions, there is no evidence for a further decline in manufacturing jobs. In fact our sample reports that for China, Western and Eastern Europe their sourcing decisions hardly impacted employment. Moreover, it was only for North America and Japan that growth of manufacturing employment is observed.

We believe the analyses and insights presented in this research not only inform but also call for action. Executives should look at their supply chains critically by challenging their current footprint and production sourcing choices. We explicitly encourage benchmarking against the companies in our sample within their industry and across industries. Insights into market expectations and the forces driving the reported production sourcing and technology decisions should stimulate a discussion about future strategic actions.

For policy makers – especially in Western (European) countries – this research provides information concerning the perceived attractiveness of regions worldwide. Reading the report will provide policy makers with data about the trends in industry and the factors that have led companies to shift production into or away from particular regions and can thus inform the debate on how manufacturing policy can boost competitiveness, attract and retain manufacturing jobs.”

For the complete report, go here → http://bit.ly/GSCBS2016

In part two of the 2016 Rosenblatt Lecture series, Jan Van Mieghem, the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Managerial Economics and Professor of Operations Management, Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business, explains how the prioritization of individual preferences (i.e., the way in which tasks are performed by healthcare professionals) can reduce throughput, or the number of patients serviced.  This lack of emphasis on collaboration and multitasking can result in decreased efficiency and, therefore, increased costs in the healthcare process.   Read full article  •  Watch part I

The Rosenblatt Lecture series was established in 2003 to honor the memory of Meir J. Rosenblatt, who taught from 1987 to 2001 at Olin Business School as the Myron Northrop Distinguished Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management. A leader among faculty, Rosenblatt often won the Teacher of the Year award at Olin and authored the book “Five Times and Still Kicking: A Life with Cancer,” having battled cancer multiple times throughout his life.

The Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship will be hosting the Boeing Patent Challenge Team Poster Session on Thursday, March 3rd at 5 p.m. in the Whitaker Hall Atrium.

Teams from the Boeing Patent Challenge will be presenting their ideas to re-purpose existing Boeing technology to solve real-world problems in new areas. The poster session will feature the teams’ work in translating the technology information into understandable language and visual representation.

Anyone interested in innovation, technology, art and design is encouraged to attend! Open to the public, please RSVP to our Facebook event here.