Elective Strategic sourcing
This year the elective ‘Strategic Sourcing’, coordinated by Fabian Nullmeier and Erick Haag, started on the 29th of January. Next to Erick and Fabian, Kees Berends, Anna Nikulina and Robbert Suurmond contributed to the course by teaching a lecture and providing coaching to student teams.
This elective was an extension of the core course Purchasing and Supply Management and therefore it was aimed at students that are interested in pursuing a career in purchasing. During the opening lecture, Boyana Siromahova taught a guest lecture in which she explained the importance of strategic sourcing. Boyana took the same course in 2014 in which she conducted her project at Liberty Global. Now, 4 years later, she has risen to the management level at Liberty Global and explained in detail how the strategic sourcing course helped her in getting there. Furthermore, she explained her day to day work to illustrate the fun and challenging aspects related to working in the area of sourcing. This immediately got the students curious about the upcoming lectures and eager to start their own company project.
The foundation of this course were 6 lectures that covered Change Management, Risk Management, Managing Supplier Innovation, Capital Contracting and Performance-based Contracting. In addition, the elective offered students the opportunity to explore strategic sourcing in practice by conducting a real-life case project at a company. In this real-life case project, the students worked in groups on a case on a strategic sourcing topic provided by the company. Students selected the project which would fit their interests best, since the projects were provided by a wide range of participating companies from different industries. Namely, this year the participating companies were AevesBenefit/Next view, KPN, Liberty Global, Mammoet, NDSM Energie, NS, SHV Energy, Tarlunt and TNT. The students were required to tackle the real-life challenge of these companies with guidance provided by their academic and company coaches.
Finally, on the 12th of March the students presented the results and implications of their work in front of their academic and company coaches. Students were proud to present their projects and received positive feedback from their coaches.
