Here at ProcureTech, we love highlighting leading thinking in the Procurement space.
Especially when a direct link between business, academia, concepts and ideas can be drawn; more on that later.
As part of their Supply Chain master’s degree, MIT require students to conduct a research project into hot topics within the supply chain space. We recommend you take a look at them all, but we have hand-picked some of the projects we felt best reflected issues procurement professionals are facing.
We felt these were most relevant to the procurement space:
Supplier Management Under Small Lot Size and Multiple Items Industry
Authored by: Shan Chen
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model for Source Selection and KPI Dashboard
Authored by: Nina Anttila, Sushanth Purandhar
Analysis of Pricing Behaviour in Freight Tendering Process
Authored by: Gihan Chinthaka Bulathsinghalage
Which is the Best Cost Country?
Authored by: Muhammad Sohaib Chaudhry, Jerry Lee
Cost Engineering Maturity Assessment and Implementation
Authored by: German Gimenez, Juyuan Lu
Fuel Price Fluctuations in the Last 30 Years
Authored by: Jianxing Wu, Pengyu Wang, Zhengyu Zhang, Gunnar Schritter, Yihong Xu
Forecasting Material Demand Using ML
Authored by: Mohamed Elasfahani, Taiwo Epebiyi
Adoption of Circular Practices in Supply Chains Through Social Networks
Authored by: Alejandro Goitia, Juan Manuel Perez
Digital Transformation of Ingredients Traceability in Food Market
Authored by: Vedasree Ramireddy, Kausalya Narasimman
Democratizing Access to Supply Chain Finance for SMEs
Authored by: Daniel Granados Nicholls, Emre Muzaffer Kulluk
Get Smart: Reinventing Plastic Recycling in a Collaborative, Circular Supply Chain
Authored by: Kenneth Critchlow, Pedro Benitez
These articles present a lot of innovative theoretical concepts, some of which are already apparent in real business application via startups in the procurement space. Cirplus and Xeneta are great examples from our ProcureTech100.
The article Get Smart: Reinventing Plastic Recycling in a Collaborative, Circular Supply Chain by Kenneth Critchlow and Pedro Benitez reflects well the position Cirplus has taken in the market with its focus on recycled plastics and their importance in reducing waste and increasing material accountability within the supply chain.
Kenneth Critchlow and Pedro Benitez highlight in their report that there is insufficient supply of recycled plastic to meet CPG industry goals of reducing the use of virgin plastic by 30-50%. Cirplus is a platform specialising in the sale of exclusively recycled plastics of varying types to push towards increasing use of recycled plastics whilst remaining cost effective for the buyer.
Another great example of where leading thinking coincides with real business application is Xeneta who focus on logistics market pricing and corresponding research and analysis on pricing behaviour. This kind of service is exactly what Benny Mantin and You Wu in their article Analysis of Pricing Behaviour in Freight Tendering Process relay as critical to enhancing the bidding processes. Services such as Xeneta can be used by both shippers as well as buyers to gain insight into the state of the market before tendering or bidding as a carrier which especially in the current inflated COVID affected market can provide significant competitive advantage.
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