PRACTICE project great success

For three years the Chair of Logistics was one of 18 partners in the large, EU-funded PRACTICE project. On December 20^th representatives from all partners met in Brussels to present the final results of the project to four reviewers from the EU-commission. The overall feedback from the reviewer board was very positive and they considered the project a great success. The reviewers highlighted the technical innovations that were achieved in close collaboration between the numerous partners.

A team from our chair was part of a work package that provides industrial use-cases for the secure cloud-computing infrastructure other PRACTICE partners are developing. Therefore, we carved out supply chain collaboration models for two distinct scenarios: secure condition based spare parts planning for a maintenance provider in the aerospace industry and secure vendor managed inventory for a manufacturer of consumer goods. In both settings our models allow improved planning by securely using sensitive information from collaborating supply chain parties. Based on these models, our partners from SAP implemented a prototype for each use case that enables collaborative forecasting while keeping the sensitive individual data from each party private. These prototypes were also presented to the reviewers in Brussels in a live demo.

During the two-day review meeting in Belgium the Chair of Logistics and Quantitative Methods was represented by Fabian Taigel. For the team from our chair the PRACTICE project was a great opportunity to tackle real-world problems we analyzed with the partners from industries and to derive potential solutions based on collaborative approaches in the specific supply chains. To see our theoretical models implemented in prototypes by our partner SAP was a huge motivation. We learned a lot about data security issues which will be beneficial for our future work in the field of data driven operations management.