KLU Students Assess Disruptive Supply Chain Technologies

Extreme close up of micro chip

KLU MSc students partnered with supply chain technology company GS1 and US drone start-up Skycart to understand the impact of new disruptive supply chain technologies. In their course “Strategic Issues in Supply Chain Management”, taught by Kai Hoberg, the challenge was to identify applications and quantify the potential of internet of things and drone technologies for logistics and supply chain management.

The class split into ten groups that worked on different topics that ranged from Quantifying Amazon‘s potential investment for last-mile drone delivery in Germany to Emerging business models from supplier’s data access at the point of consumption. Over the course of the semester the students interacted with practitioners to prepare their in-depth presentation. Hoberg, Associate Professor of Supply Chain and Operations Strategy, enjoyed this format and sees also a lot of benefits for the students “It was great to see how the student’s interacted with the CEO of Skycart in a call to discuss their questions”.

The students provided many interesting solutions and also identified use cases. For example, they found potential for drone deliveries after talking to hotels in Switzerland or pharmacies on German islands. On the other hand they also identified many use cases on how to leverage the internet of things, for example printers that share the ink consumption with the printer manufacturer.

Christoph Windheuser, head of consulting at GS1 Germany and Business Development Manager Europe at Skycart, was providing feedback in the final presentation and enjoyed the format: “The quality of the presentations was really good and I would love to participate again next year”. KLU student Sebastian Buchholz who joined the MSc program with a bachelor's degree from WWU Münster agreed: "It was an interesting and fun challenge to investigate what the internet of things is and discover ways how to further use it. Everyone did a great job highlighting this in their presentations."