Intelligent Supply Chain Labs

Project Description

Given its impact on customer satisfaction and financial margin, supply chain management is playing an increasingly strategic role in corporate success. While companies have invested research & development resources in areas such as product and manufacturing design, there is far less research investment in developing new concepts, technologies and processes that enable efficient and effective matching of supply and demand. More and more companies are looking for partners in developing the next supply chain innovations.

Defining a research environment for supply chain management is a challenge since it involves a complex set of activities spanning locations worldwide. The information flow through the supply network of systems is critical in making sure these activities are coordinated to effectively respond to the consumer. Hence, supply chain research can and must be linked to the information, workflow, and decision support systems that enable managers to control the flow of goods and services in real-time.

Intelligent Supply Chain Labs comprise several integrated laboratories involving technology, information system, organizational, product design, and retail environments. The laboratories will host advanced supply chain software applications – both commercial and prototype – to serve as an experimental environment for development and testing of new and innovative concepts and applications. Interactive visualization and design technologies will facilitate individual and group research activities that could include human-machine interaction experiments and behavioral studies to develop insights on organizational transformation. In addition to being an experimental environment for researchers, the Labs will be a test environment for comparative software evaluation, an educational environment for training students and executives, and a feedback environment for software providers to learn about requirements.

Participating Organizations