Building on the success of the IBM Shared University Research programme within the Supply Chain discipline, the UCD Smurfit Business School is one of the first universities to establish a module in SSME.
Eamonn Ambrose, Michael Smurfit Business School, UCD receives the IBM Faculty Award from Sal Calta, Vice President Worldwide Manufacturing, System i,p & z, Dan Carrell, Dublin Technology
Campus Executive & Director ISC Server Manufacturing, and Tim Carroll, Vice President Supply Chain Operations I
Building on the success of the IBM Shared University Research programme within the Supply Chain discipline, the UCD Smurfit Business School is one of the first universities to establish a module in SSME. In recognition of Dr. Eamonn Ambrose's ongoing work to develop the SSME curriculum with the UCD Michael Smurfit Business School he recently received an IBM Faculty award which is valued at $25,000.
This was based on the research on IBM's supply chain carried out by the two universities over the past two years. This research programme has been extended this year to a worldwide Services Supply Chain project. Dan Carrell, Dublin Technology Campus Executive & Director ISC Server Manufacturing commented "IBM is very pleased to recognize Eamonn with this faculty award for his leadership in Service Supply Chain Curriculum Development". I believe that applying supply chain principles effectively within the Services arena will be key enabler for IBM to achieve our goal of a Globally Integrated and Optimized Enterprise. We appreciate Eamon's vision and support of this goal by creating curriculum, courses and teaching materials that allow our university partners to educate and teach our future leaders how to optimize the benefits for our business in this sphere".
In addition to developing a broader course for the post graduate business programme, Eamonn and his colleagues from UCD and Dr. Dan Lynch, Michigan State University delivered a workshop to the ISC Procurement team in Dublin.
SSME (Services Science, Management and Engineering) is emerging as a distinct field of study - with Information and business services, the service economy's fastest growing segments - and with the rise of web services, SOA and self-service systems there is a strong relationship between the study of service systems and the study of computational systems. The Cambridge SSME Symposium in July, 2007 reported that many individual elements of the knowledge and expertise relating to service systems already exist in different areas of business and academic disciplines, but are often unconnected and no longer reflect the reality of interconnected economic activity.
SSME therefore aims to understand how an organisation can invest effectively to create service innovations and to realize more predictable outcomes. The idea is to bring together ongoing work in computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social and cognitive sciences, and legal sciences. A key goal is to integrate this knowledge needed to create more systematic approaches to service innovations. Unlike the services of the past, in theory these new services will deliver much higher value and fundamental business improvement. The result will be that things can be made not only cheaper but we will have better, more interesting service products. James Flynn, IBM University Relations Programme Manager noted ‘’this research work is an integrative, cross disciplinary undertaking. Many disciplines have knowledge and methods to contribute to a better understanding of service systems. The key is to apply that understanding to improve business systems for practical business benefits".
Tom Begley, Dean of the UCD School of Business commented "The UCD Smurfit School of Business is delighted to partner with IBM on this exciting initiative in the emerging area of Services Science. Eamonn Ambrose has been involved in the IBM Integrated Supply Chain Research Consortium since its inception and this Award is recognition of the lead role he has taken in curriculum innovation in service-based-supply chains in collaboration with IBM."