Building Block for a World Class University

Centre for Excellence of Research: Building Block of a World Class University

Dr. Yee Choy Leong
Universiti Putra Malaysia
Graduate School of Management
Global Supply Network Research Centre

Recommendation: establishing an excellence research centre:

1. To use an industrial-academia collaboration concept. To provide a platform for discussions, research, and exchange of idea among managers from industry and researchers from academia. This is not a new concept, in fact it was well known by many countries for many years however the main concern here is about how? How to do it better and how to form an effective and established research centre?
2. To form an interest group (within industrial managers, academics, and graduate students, i.e. PhDs, MPhils, and MBAs).
3. To identify current research in global supply network:
• Materials flow
• Information sharing
• Financial transaction
• Relationships management
• Strategy and performance
(Academic disciplines: Operations management, logistics, purchasing, new products development and innovations, information technology, marketing, finance, organisational behaviour, strategic management)
4. To keep proper references, build a library or resource centre, organise/participate in related forums, seminars, and conferences.
5. To focus on limited areas but do it better (based on the rationale that a university is having limited resources and expertise in doing a wide range of research work). Examples can be obtained from Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing (specialised in manufacturing strategy and performance measurement), Bath (specialised in health supply network and transparency), Cardiff (specialised in value stream management based on waste elimination), Cranfield (specialised in supply chain relationship, change), and Warwick (specialised in modelling techniques, etc).
6. To keep track with global research communities and identify possible joint research work.
7. To identify some specific research projects.
8. To let our graduate students/academics in carrying out these projects. The main concerns here are the introduction and the use of proper research methodologies (such as process approach) and the participations of industrial managers in the research projects. The outputs of these research projects are in the forms of tools, processes, methods, or frameworks. These outputs could help companies in improving their performances. Examples of similar work are obtainable from www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk.
9. To further promote our research outputs through publishing our work in journal, organising workshops, and offering consultation.
10. To offer/sell these outputs to a wider industrial context, on the one hand to help Malaysian companies to achieve better performance and on the other hand to further validate the research outputs to enhance theory development (such as through generalisation of the research findings).
11. To promote the centre in overseas and attract more expertise in doing research here and eventually equipped the centre with the capabilities to offer a wide range of products and services to local industries.