Supply Chain Alignment (SCalign)

Project Statement and Objectives

Project Statement

This is a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC Linkage) project to develop a distinctive analytical approach that can be used to profile customer behaviour.
The aim is to identify knowledge-based capabilities required to create
customer value in the supply chain and explore their relationship to the way in
which competitive bids are won. Further, we will demonstrate that a major cause
of excessive costs in supply chains is due to “mis-alignment” between buyer
behaviour segments and the supply chain orientation (i.e., continuous replenishment, lean, agile) deployed by the firm.

This research cofunded by the ARC, The University of Wollongong, The Australian Graduate School of Management and DHL

Approach

The research will employ a four stage approach that will:

(1) combine experiment and segmentation techniques to identify those attributes that influence customer behaviour,

(2) combine empirical and experiment techniques to measure the organisational and team capabilities within DHL that provide customer value;

(3) develop a model of competitive bidding that supports prediction; and

(4) assess the validity of our model's prediction capability by empirically measuring the performance implication of actual (versus predicted) change.