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Master Thesis Opportunity in Collaboration with Aioneers: „Process Mining in Supply Chains“

Currently, we offer a new master thesis topic in collaboration with Aioneers. The topic covers process mining in supply chains and how to leverage decision-making in the S&OP process.

Various industries are currently facing serious shortage situations, leading to supply problems for companies and their customers. Insightful planning of supply chains can help mitigate bottlenecks and establish stable supply.

The Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process is a core planning and decision-making process in companies to align mid-term sales plans with the ability to fulfil by manufacturing and distribution. This planning process is crucial to provide high service levels for customers and run supply chains on a profitable and less cash-intensive level. The S&OP process typically comprises five major steps that are performed in a monthly cycle. It consists of several activities in different systems and decisions are often kept in e-mails, presentations and documents. Lack of conformity to the documented standard, no traceability of decisions and results co­unteract the idea of S&OP and carry the risk poor execution of plans.

Process mining can help to discover the real process flows, identify conformance issues and measure the performance of a process. However, process mining typically assumes a highly-structured, IT-supported process and an according data base, which is not necessarily the case for S&OP.

This master thesis should investigate the applicability of process mining in S&OP on a conceptual level. Therefore, the candidate should review the relevant literature and conduct interviews with domain experts to answer the following research questions:

  • How could the S&OP process benefit from Process Mining?
  • What are prerequisites for applying process mining in S&OP? 
  • What data is available for the S&OP process? 
  • How could this data be leveraged for process mining?

Find more information here.

If you are interested, please get in touch with Prof. Rehse.

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