The 5th PERFORM training week on the Retail Operations and Logistics is successfully completed!
On 5th-9th October 2020, 14 ESRs, their supervisors, and guest lecturers met digitally and worked together on various topics around Omnichannel retailing.
Lectures of renowned researchers
The training week activities included academic lectures of renowned professors, industrial sessions from practitioners, several workshops, and interactive Q&A sessions.
The week started with the lecture on the Omnichannel Logistics given by Tom Van Woensel, Full Professor of Freight Transport and Logistics at TU/e. Sarah Gelper, Associate Professor of Marketing Analytics at TU/e, addressed the statistics and data analysis methods in her interactive workshop. Assistant Professor of Retail Operations at TU/e, Karel van Donselaar, shared state-of–the–art studies on the Retail Operations focusing on inventory optimization.
Discussions with industry experts
We attended two inspiring sessions from industry experts in operations, although the COVID-19 restrictions prevented us from visiting the companies and seeing the inner part of omnichannel retailing operations in practice.
At the first industrial session, we reviewed the omnichannel approach at Nike with Fokko De Rooij, Vice President of Demand & Supply Management at Nike (EMEA). During this insightful discussion, we touched on different topics including order fulfilment operations, customer segmentation, challenges and benefits of brick-and-mortar shops, possible artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the vision for the future of Nike.
The second industrial session on the e-commerce order fulfilment journey at vidaXL was given by Erik van der Hooft, the manager of Supply Chain Control at vidaXL. We went deep into the details of warehouse operations that stand behind each part of the customer journey and studied the structure of the supply chain on the example of vidaXL.
Preparation for the future
The educational program of the Training Week included Q&A sessions about the personal grants as many ESRs are preparing their way towards further scientific career and independent research. Ingrid Vliegen, Program Manager of the EurotechPostdoc2 program co-funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND at TU/e, Karoline Duijvesz, personal grant coordinators at TU/e and Nevin Mutlu, Assistant Professor at TU/e and recipient of the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship, provided valuable insights and answered to our questions about different grants for postdoctoral researches. Moreover, Suki Sandhu, Head of Intellectual Property and Licensing at TU/e, gave a valuable lecture on Intellectual Property exploitation.
Finally, two workshops were dedicated to cooperation within the Work Packages. Nevin Mutlu organized a workshop on the dissemination activities, where we planned the future collaborations on providing the webinars to different auditories. In another workshop organized by Anita Mirijamdotter, Professor of Informatics at Linnaeus University, ESRs shared the current status of the Work Packages and reflected on the research output so far.
PERFORM Annual Research Summit
The PERFORM annual Research summit took place during the training week. All ESRs and the invited guest,Faranak Khooban, PhD student from TU/e, submitted their working papers. All participants presented their works and had an opportunity to get elaborated feedback from a reviewer and auditory. As many supervisors echoed, the talks of ESRs were of high quality and the development of works is evident.
We would like to thank all participants of the Training Week 5 for active participation, productive time, and helpful feedback. This week was a truly valuable experience for all of us.
We wish to meet everybody in person at the Training Week 6 in Maynooth!
Albina Galiullina and Somayeh Torkaman, ESRs of T5 organizing committee.