KLU Welcomes Dr Mirjam Meijer as Professor of Operations Management

While completing her PhD, Meijer, who hails from the historic Hanseatic town of Zwolle in the Netherlands, was granted a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to visit UCLA’s Anderson School of Management (University of California). Her plans to attend were disrupted by the Covid pandemic, however, and the UCLA’s loss was very much KLU’s gain.

Her PhD research, she says, revolved predominantly around finding solutions for supply-chain coordination issues in high-tech industries and involved industry heavyweights in the Netherlands such as Philips and ASML, as well as their suppliers.

“My work was inspired by the problems these companies face in everyday life,” she explains. “Can we find some mechanism so that the individual parties in the supply chain make decisions that are better for the whole supply chain? For getting there, Meijer is using math-based methodologies: “So, what I try to do in my research is to extend the mathematical models of supply chains that already exist or make new models to include specific characteristics of an industry."

In this case it was the high-tech industries and the type of products - such as multi-million dollar medical systems and microchip manufacturing machines - they build consist of many components that all need to be assembled into a final product.

“There's this very big difference in the value of the component that the suppliers are making and the value of the end-product that’s actually created,” Meijer says. “So, it’s important to find a way to align these incentives such that the supplier may be willing to invest in more capacity than would actually be optimal for them; otherwise, the supply chain as a whole may suffer if they cannot produce these components.”

A keen rower and cyclist, Meijer is involved in a KLU research project on agricultural supply chains. “I think it's very interesting because it is sort of the same techniques I've been using before, only you need to think of other characteristics that are specific to this type of supply chain that you want to incorporate in your modelling. It would be very interesting to do more work in the field of food and agricultural supply chains.”

As well as having her research published in the European Journal of Operational Research and Naval Research Logistics, Meijer has presented her work at a number of  international conferences including INFORMS, MSOM, and the International Symposium of Inventory Research.

Welcome to the KLU!

More Information:
Web page of Prof. Dr Mirjam Meijer