Supply chain analytics was the topic at hand during the Fourth Annual Business Analytics Workshop. Held in College Park and Co-sponsored by the Robert H. Smith School of Business and IBM, the day-long workshop consisted of topics ranging from cyber supply chain risk management to disaster response planning and logistics.
The confernece’s keynote speaker was the Honorable Jacques S. Gansler, former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. Currently, Gansler is a professor in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and director of the Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise.
“Analytics is critical to logistics and supply chain, and in turn defense,” said Gansler, whose discussion focused on logistics in the federal Department of Defense. Gansler said that industry is investing twice as much in research as the federal government and that in order for the U.S. to have world-class logistics, the federal government needs to change the way it does business.
“Right now we are working with more than 2,000 individual IT systems,” he said.
The workshop ended with a panel discussion on supply chain management moderated by event organizer Michael Ball, senior associate dean for faculty and research and Dean’s Chair in Management Science. The All-Star panel included Arnold Greenland, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Global Business Services (retired); Rich Wong, Lead Operations Analyst, UPS; and Russell Barton, Senior Associate Dean and Professor of Supply Chain and Information Systems at the Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University. The panelists discussed supply chain game changers like GPS, RFID, mobile, social, big data, and the cloud.
“This workshop continues to bring together thought leaders in the field of business analytics and this year’s event offered a great look into the power of data on the supply chain,” said Ball. “The success of this workshop is particularly thrilling for me because I’ve been doing ‘analytics’ for decades – long before it was called ‘analytics’ and became such a trendy topic.’”