10th Meeting, European Section at the Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany 16th - 17th of February 2011
The main topic of the meeting was Latest Technologies for Supply Chain Innovation.Please also see the detailed agenda for more information. Keynote: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hasso Plattner, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board, SAP AG Speakers:
- Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel, President and CEO, Hasso Plattner Institute
- Prof. Dr. David Simchi-Levi, Director of the MIT Forum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Dr. William Killingsworth, Executive Director of the MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Dr. Paul Hofmann, Vice President, SAP Labs Palo Alto
- Dr. Feixiong Liu, Senior Staff Manager, Technology Manager, Intel EMEA
- Martin Peuker, CIO, Charité Berlin
- Markus Quicken, CEO, SupplyOn
- Cees van der Hoven, CEO and VP Marketing & Product Management, Facton GmbH
- Prof. Dr. Sebastian Kummer, WU Wien, Director of the European Section of the MIT Forum
Event Location: The New HPI Main Building
The meeting took place at the new HPI main building which was inaugurated in the summer term 2010. You can find more information about this new main building including videos of its construction at the HPI website.Evening Reception
The evening reception took place in the foyer of the new main building of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. With the inspiring atmosphere of the research institute, the participants got to know each other and shared their professional experiences.
The MIT Forum for Supply Chain Innovation: 5 Years in Europe
After an introduction of the Hasso Plattner Institute by its President and CEO Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel, the executive director of the MIT Forum, Dr. William Killingsworth, introduced the MIT Forum as an opportunity for executives and leaders to come together and relate their strategy with regards to supply chain management. Killingsworth pointed out that technology innovation is one of the major challenges for the future. The MIT Forum can have a significant role to achieve or sustain competitive advantage with regards to supply chain management for all of its members. Further, he thanked Dr. Alexander Zeier, director of the European section of the MIT Forum, for five successful years of the MIT Forum in Europe. Zeier continued by moderating the event and introducing the speakers.
Keynote: In-Memory Technology – Enabling Enterprise Computing at the Speed of Thought
In his interesting keynote, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hasso Plattner, co-founder and chairman of the supervisory board of the SAP AG, gave insights into the potential of in-memory database technology. After introducing the basics of in-memory technology, Plattner pointed out some applications in the supply chain context that can leverage this technolgy to achieve performance improvements of many orders of magnitudes. This way, not only can existing processes be accelerated. Instead, completely new business processes can be realized as Plattner demonstrated with a new Available-To-Promise rescheduling scenario. The fruitful discussion afterwards showed the possible impact of this innovative technology.
Matching Products, Markets and Strategies: The Case of Dell Supply Chain 2.0
Prof. Dr. David Simchi-Levi, the director of the MIT Forum and professor at MIT, gave a presentation on a very interesting study that points out the correlations between business strategy, supply chain and operation strategy as well as the IT strategy of corporations.
New Business Application Powered by In-Memory Technology from Academia
In his presentation, Dr. Paul Hofmann, Vice President in the Group of the Chief Scientist at SAP Labs Palo Alto referred about fascinating academic projects and their impact on future business applications. The projects he talked about are conducted at Princeton, Stanford, MIT, HPI and others. These insights into future technologies widened the scope of the meeting and let to fruitful discussions about possible areas of applications.
Disruptive Trends in Computing Technology
Dr. Feixiong Lui, Technology Manager at Intel EMEA, gave insights into the past, present, and future developments in the area of central processing units (CPUs) and server technology that facilitate next level product and process innovation. This immediately resulted in a discussion about how to run future supply chains differently.
In-Memory Analytics at Charite
Martin Peuker and Holger Troch shared their insights about in-memory applications at Charité Berlin. They explained how they cope with the massive amount of data. The presented use cases showed the applicability of in-memory data management not only in the area of business intelligence but also as real-time analytics. This, finally, increases competitiveness and helps Charité to establish itself as a relevant project partner for conjoint research projects with industry partners.
IT Supply Chain Providers in a Volatile World
Markus Quicken, CEO of SupplyOn presented which crucial role an IT Supply Chain Provider can play in today's volatile world. He presented the concept how to enable cross-company collaboration by networking all of the worldwide business partners of the manufacturing industry through the Internet.
Product Cost Transparency in the Manufacturing Industry's Supply Chain
Cees van den Hoven, the CEO and VP Marketing & Product Management at Facton GmbH? presented the challenges of the automotive supply chain with regard to long planning horizons. He emphasized that decisions in product design have a huge impact on product cost over the product's complete lifecycle and how manufacturing companies could improve their competitiveness by increasing product cost transparency.
Next steps
In the late afternoon, Dr. Alexander Zeier announced the next global meeting at the MIT on May 5th and the next meeting of the European section in Vienna on September 20th and 21st.
The discussion after the forum involving Prof. David Simchi-Levi and many attendees obviously showed the advantage of the MIT Forum, thus, giving supply chain experts and leaders the opportunity to share experiences, analyze situations and give advice based on the joint knowledge of the participants.
