Current research

Our research is categorised into four themes:

1. Supply chain collaboration.
2. Supply chain risk management.
3. Sustainable supply chain management.
4. Supply chain networks and infrastructures

These themes are highly relevant and critical to New Zealand’s supply chains in today’s context. We aim to provide our students and corporate members with relevant and quality research by moving ahead in the fields of operations and supply chain management.

Activities include:

• A coordinating unit for research teams and funding sources.
• Ongoing faculty and graduate student research.
• Commissioned research and interaction with external agents, institutes and organisations.

Centre members are currently working on research projects as outlined further down the page.

This project investigates warehousing location strategies to evaluate, for an organisation, the related costs and benefits for different scenarios. Results from this project should present implications to the organisation’s commercial business on lead time, serviceability, current site activities, and impact of workforce and workflow. Such objectives are to be achieved through activities including:

• Process/workflow mapping.
• Cost driver analysis
• Financial evaluation.
• Qualitative and risk assessment.
• Implications for current site.
• Recommendations.

The goal of the project is to establish the current operation issues deemed to be important by the port and terminal operators in New Zealand.

Initial data about the current issues will be gathered by conducting face to face interviews with the port and terminal operators. Then the preliminary findings from the interviews will be used as discussion topics for a focus group meeting. The focus group will be made up of invited participants from the port operators and management group.

The output from the project will be a report to management on the current operation issues as defined by the port and terminal operators.

This research is dedicated to the design and performance measurement of new polyhedral algorithms for solving some difficult combinatorial optimisation problems. The symmetric travelling salesman problem (STSP) is chosen for study, and the related designed polyhedral algorithms are based on the multistage insertion formulation (MI) and its characteristics.

Hendrik’s research looks at the pressure of the sustainability of supply chain in a New Zealand context. The objective is to identify the key drivers for integrating sustainable supply chain management and its potential benefits.

Third party logistics (3PL) providers play an important role in a supply chain. However, most companies feel that they are hard to survive in fierce competition. 3PL providers need to have a cross-functional presence to keep competitive advantages. Third party purchase is a good option for those companies to increase their services. Therefore, this research will focus on third party purchase as additional value added by 3PL providers and help them keep a sustained competitive advantage.

The study attempts to investigate the impacts of outcome-driven supply chain management (ODSCM) practices in SME. The study aims to answer two main research questions:

• What are the core processes that construct ODSCM?
• What actual competitive advantages business can gain after ODSCM implementation?