2003-04 ANNUAL REPORT

CREATING AND DISSEMINATING LEADING-EDGE KNOWLEDGE.

MARKETING & SUPPLY CHAIN

IBM LAB, NEW SOFTWARE PROVIDE STUDENTS WITH
POWERFUL SUPPLY CHAIN MODELING TOOLS

Broad School students now have access to a new center for joint research and study of advanced supply chain practices. IBM provided software, eServer and storage technologies through a Shared University Research (SUR) award to create the Center for On-Demand Supply Chain Research, a laborator y that ser ves as an environment for modeling and analysis of an ondemand supply chain.

Broad School faculty are currently using the laboratory to study, simulate and test the key relationships in an end-to-end supply chain, focusing on the dynamic flow of information and the resulting interdependencies between them. So far, a Broad doctoral student has used the lab to complete his dissertation, and Associate Professor of Marketing and Supply Chain Management Anthony Ross is using the lab to complete cutting-edge Radio Frequency

Identification Device (RFID) research. (See Ross profile below.) Broad School faculty help IBM and other companies build dynamic supply chains that can sense and rapidly respond to changing customer demands and market conditions.

Supply chain students have been reaping benefits from the lab as well. Led by The John H. McConnell Chair in Business Administration David Closs, master’s students taking Marketing/ Logistics Simulation (MSC 931) in the spring of 2004 used the simulations in the lab to illustrate and test alternative supply chain strategies.

Eventually, IBM plans to link the Broad School lab, via an advanced computing grid, with other leading partner universities specializing in supply chain management. Laboratories will soon be completed at the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University, the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and the Smurfit School of Business at University College Dublin, Ireland. When operational, the grid of interconnected laboratories—which would be the first grid computing research project in supply chain management that IBM has undertaken in cooperation with academia—will allow these universities to collaborate and conduct joint applied research and teaching across a group of interconnected laboratories.