In Collaboration
Pattern x Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence
BETTER, FASTER, GREENER
Research impact is now a crucial part of academia, and that means universities are forging new and deeper connections with industry. That ethos is at the core of Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence. We spoke to Centre Director Prof Alireza Shokri and research group convener Dr Adrian Small to find out how they and their colleagues help businesses to modernise their supply chain and operations management.
Words by Arlen Pettitt
Photography by Christopher Owens
Northumbria University’s City Campus East building looks exactly how you’d expect a modern university to look. It’s a striking building that’s home to a number of teams, including members of the business and law faculty.
It’s also home to the new Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence.
The Centre has a physical space within the university, which is available for training, networking, collaboration with industry, and other events, as well as a digital space for data sharing, data analytics and delivering the digital aspects of the Centre’s offer.
That offer is part of an ethos within the university that academic research should have a real world impact. By connecting businesses with a multi-disciplinary team of experts, the Centre helps bring more technology and fresher thinking into the way organisations operate.
This can mean employing higher quality data collection and analysis, or harnessing artificial intelligence, but just as often it means bringing a keen eye and challenging the idea that just because something has always been done a certain way, that’s how it ought to be done.
The Centre’s Director is Prof Alireza Shokri, whose background in the agriculture and food sector saw him take on senior practitioner roles in industry as a supply chain manager and quality manager, before turning to full time academia in 2011.
“Its mission is to bridge the academic world with industry - to co-create knowledge and to generate impactful and innovative solutions for supply chain and operation excellence.” - Alizera
Sat on the ground floor of the building, a public space with a cafe, and tables and booths for meeting and working, Alireza describes the vision for the Centre as integrating academic expertise with industry needs.
“Its mission is to bridge the academic world with industry,” he says, “to co-create knowledge and to generate impactful and innovative solutions for supply chain and operation excellence.”
In practical terms, it’s about doing things more efficiently, and more robustly, in a rapidly changing world.
Doing so would mean businesses are better placed to deal with shocks, and they are better able to make positive social, environmental and economic contributions.
Prof Shokri explains how almost any size of business, in any sector, could benefit from working with them.
“Businesses face mounting pressure in terms of the supply chain disruption and inefficiency,” he explains, “and - I’ll give you the statistic - that would cost the UK businesses almost £12 billion a year.”
Alireza says with seven in ten large organisations and six in ten SMEs listing digitalisation as important to them, embedding that in supply chains to help manage the combined challenges of efficiency, resilience and sustainability is now sitting high in the list of priorities for businesses.
Global consultancy firms including Deloitte and PwC have also highlighted the importance of focusing on supply chains, with research showing 86% of US manufacturers have worked to de-risk their supply chains and 58% of businesses pointing to technological resilience as an area for development.
In the UK, the CBI has argued for resilience over low-cost when it comes to food industry supply chains, and emphasised that collaboration is critical to solving the problems industry faces.
The Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence sits squarely within that agenda, with the potential to serve a range of industries.
With that variety of potential industry partners comes a variety of challenges, and the Centre draws on a broad range of academic expertise, supported by the Department's Decision-Making Research Group.
That group - which acts as an advisory board, amongst its wider functions - is convened by Dr Adrian Small, who is Associate Professor of Operations Management at Northumbria University’s Newcastle Business School.
Adrian joined Northumbria University in 2020, and his background is in the adoption of technology. This has seen him work with organisations as varied as police forces and the construction sector as part of research, consultancy and knowledge transfer roles.
He explains how the Decision-Making Research Group supports the Centre to draw in colleagues with expertise in operations and supply chain, marketing and analytics, as well as the wider faculty including human resource management, entrepreneurship, and finance and law.
“It’s designed to help businesses going through new technological challenges,” Dr Small says, “around things like AI, big data, data analytics and their digital supply chain.”
“The Centre's not designed to be this closed-off thing,” he continues, “it’s designed to engage with industry.”
That engagement often begins with one-off projects - dealing with a set challenge or transformation - but Adrian says his hope is always that these consultancy projects turn into fruitful long-term partnerships, and says that’s where the real transformative value is found.
“It could be me or somebody else doing a small bit of consultancy or scoping out what the problem is,” he says, “or it could be a student project to kind of start that relationship, start that understanding between the two parties.”
That’s also why the physical space is an important element of the Centre’s offer, because potential partners might regularly go past the university buildings but never set foot inside.
“The Centre's not designed to be this closed-off thing,” he continues, “it’s designed to engage with industry.” - Adrian
Universities can be complex and intimidating places to the uninitiated, and it can be quite difficult with some institutions to find an appropriate first point of contact - especially if you think you might have a problem, but aren’t sure exactly what that problem is or who you might need to help solve it.
“If they haven't collaborated with the university before,” Adrian sympathises, “with all these strange academics, what do they do?”
In comparison to many of its peers, Northumbria University does very well on this, with a visible business engagement team and high profile offers like the student project-focused Business Clinic.
The Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence and its team also help break down the barriers between the university and business, as well as encourage more collaboration, which includes encouraging potential partners into the university to meet or to attend training or events.
Northumbria University is an institution which has been on a journey.
Established as a university in 1992 when a wave of former polytechnics received university status, the university is symbolic of the breakdown of outdated divides in the sector.
“We listen to the clients, we talk to them - what do they want, what are their problems, what are their requirements - and then we work with them collaboratively to find the best route for solving that problem.” - Alizera
A period of extraordinary transformation culminated with Northumbria being crowned the Times Higher Education University of the Year in 2022.
It’s a prestigious award - the Best Picture Oscar of UK Higher Education - and the judges particularly praised the university’s evolution into a research intensive institution to rival the long-established institutions including its Russell Group neighbour in the city, Newcastle University, which was also shortlisted for the award that year.
Northumbria’s offer is characterised by strong student outcomes, deep business engagement and research impact.
They are very much part of the region’s fabric, and that ethos runs through the Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence, which will often work with other significant North East organisations.
Prof Shokri gives the example of a £1.3 million Digital Catapult project, which worked with local SMEs to bring together their data and use machine learning to create a digital testbed assessing end-to-end supply chains for better efficiency, resilience and sustainability.
This provides a way to try out innovative approaches to supply chain management without disrupting day-to-day operations.
It’s an eye-catching service built with local and national industry, with the aim of helping them trial any innovations.
But for most businesses, the process will start in a more simple way - with a face-to-face chat. Dr Small explains how a first step when working with a new industry partner is typically a process of problem identification.
Someone might arrive with what they think is a marketing problem, but as the experts get to know their business they uncover the real root of the issues.
It’s why partnership and long-term collaboration is so important, rather than what Adrian calls a “come to the shop, buy something, here's your product, here's your service, thank you, off you go” approach.
Prof Shokri echoes that.
“We provide bespoke support for businesses based on their needs,” he says. “We listen to the clients, we talk to them - what do they want, what are their problems, what are their requirements - and then we work with them collaboratively to find the best route for solving that problem.”
That could be contract research, where the expertise in the university is sent away to investigate a problem set by a business, or direct consultancy, or traditional Knowledge Transfer Partnership, or student projects, or a CPD training offer.
There’s an element of community-building for those in supply chain roles and their organisations too, through the Centre’s engagement, quarterly events and networking, access to consultancy hours and learning resources, and discounts on training.
“One of our roles is to look for funding opportunities,” Dr Small explains about those projects, “and some of the funding might require partners, so that could be a way to work with us as well, by being part of a particular grant we’re applying for.”
“Students have access to the real world case studies that we’ve worked on with industry. Those real world projects give them transformational development and learning.” - Alizera
By building relationships with organisations at all stages of the supply chain transformation process, the Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence hopes to be an integral part of the modernisation of its home region of the North East, as well as working with partners across the country.
This Centre’s focus, and its alignment with the key sectors in the region - those like automotive, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and big service providers like the NHS - is one of the reasons why Northumbria University has been so keen to give the initiative its backing.
“We saw through Brexit and then through the pandemic the companies that managed their supply chain and their operations better were more successful than the companies that didn’t,” Dr Smalls explains.
Having identified the importance of supply chains, it was then about applying the latest thinking.
“Historically it was all about being lean, and then it became more about being agile,” Adrian says. “Now you need to match the two, and digital technologies can help you do that.”
Prof Shokri points to a contract research project with Northumbria NHS Foundation Trust’s facilities management team, which has helped them enhance their data management processes and begin a process of digital transformation. It’s a vital project for a trust which manages multiple sites across a large geographic area, and which - in common with the rest of the NHS - is feeling the pressure to be more efficient with budgets.
These projects also provide opportunities for enhanced learning for Northumbria’s students.
“Students have access to the real world case studies that we’ve worked on with industry,” Alireza explains. “Those real world projects give them transformational development and learning.”
Those on courses connected to supply chains and operations management also get the chance to use the digital testbed, originally developed for industry, as part of their projects.
More broadly, both Alireza and Adrian talk about the next few years as an opportunity to drive change in the region, and to support the devolution agenda by helping the industries of the North to grow in a sustainable and efficient way.
The striking thing about the Centre and its offer is how mutually beneficial it is.
Businesses come for solutions and support in innovating. Researchers get to translate their work into practical impact. Students get the opportunity to enrich their learning. The university can raise its profile and develop meaningful relationships outside of the sector.
“We've got the expertise, we've got the infrastructure, we have the cutting edge research,” Adrian says, and both he and Alireza see a sustainable and growing future for the Centre, as an entity which sits within academia bringing in research grants and, outside of it, supporting and working with industry.
“Our Centre is quite unique in the UK,” Alireza says, “because we bring digitalisation and excellence together in the context of supply chain and operations in any sector.”
“Over the next couple of years, we want to be doing even more with local industry,” he concludes, “more collaborative research, and more to support the strong position of Northumbria University as a centre of excellence.”
Learn more
To find out more about the Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence,
or to explore Supply Chain Club membership,
please email the team on cdsce@northumbria.ac.uk
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