EMSBS has seven corporate chairs exploring various themes in the field of management sciences. The Head of R & D and the heads of two chairs in particular were asked about how they function and their purpose.
How do the chairs at EMSBS work, and how are they created?
A chair is born when the needs expressed by one or more organizations align with the academic expertise of the School's researchers. The purpose of EMSBS chairs is to fund research projects that are well conceived upstream, with clear objectives in terms of co-creating and disseminating knowledge.
Funding for a chair may come from one or more donors. It is a multiyear funding program, with a minimum amount of €30K per year over the course of three years.
The funds collected are donated to the University of Strasbourg Foundation. These payments are treated as “donations,” giving rise to a 60% tax reduction for companies, and 80% of the funds are directly used to finance research activities related to a chair. The rest of the funds are distributed to the Foundation, the University of Strasbourg, and EMSBS in the form of a flat-rate levy of 20%. The chairs benefit from the administrative support of the Foundation and its work with companies and from EMSBS support services for assistance with event organization, communications, corporate relations, etc. If colleagues have a chair project in mind, I would love to hear about it!
Géraldine Broye, Head of R & D
We asked the heads of two chairs to describe the aim of their chair and its impact on their research activity. Here is what they said:
Created in 2017, the Wine & Tourism Chair promotes the development of expertise on the themes of wine, tourism, and wine tourism. It adopts a collective approach, bringing together researchers and practitioners to work on interdisciplinary and intersectoral innovation projects. The objective is to have a real impact by creating and transferring knowledge from the academic world to the professional world and vice versa.
The Wine & Tourism Chair unites researchers from different universities in France and around the world, giving them the opportunity to create and develop transregional and national projects. It allows its members to anchor their research in real business practices. This anchoring responds to a double necessity: The first is intrinsically linked to the development of research in management sciences in line with the needs of stakeholders (companies, institutions, etc.). The second is the need for research to be funded by the companies directly involved.
Research topics include (1) marketing, and more specifically the behaviors and experiences of wine tourists and the development of wine brands; (2) logistics and distribution channels in the wine industry; (3) business models of wineries and tourism companies and the governance of the sectors; (4) and finally, the impact of digitalization and innovation on the wine, tourism, and wine tourism sectors.
Coralie Haller, Head of the Wine & Tourism Chair
The FM Logistic chair is supported by the company FM Logistic and is dedicated to research studies in supply chain management (SCM). The research work of the chair focuses on decision support in strategic planning. The two main research projects underway for 2021/2022 differ not only in the planning method analyzed but also in scope: (1) the warehouse system and (2) the production system.
The warehouse system: research consists in characterizing the warehouse of the future by forecasting the evolution of warehouses according to objectives and challenges generally linked to the evolution of the market and the environment. The research hypothesis is as follows: there is a problem when there is a contradiction. Expected decision support, a priori counterintuitive and a posteriori fundamental, is a reference model described by all the problems in the form of conflicting design rules.
The production system: a new planning and execution method was created in 2011. It is called DDMRP for Demand Driven MRP. Empirical and scientific studies have shown the value of the DDMRP method. However, like any new method, a learning phase is necessary. Depending on the characteristics of the system to be planned, the parametrization of the method must be adapted. Expected decision support is a parameterization method that is efficient (i.e., finding optimal parameterization solutions), fast (i.e., proposing sufficiently short calculation times to study different parameterization scenarios), and ergonomic in its use and in the restitution of results.
The FM Logistic Chair is associated with the Master of Supply Chain Management (SCM) at EMSBS. The results of our research are integrated into the program. The above-mentioned work is notably presented in the courses: Conception d’entrepôt and Planification et pilotage de la production.
David Damand, Head of the FM Logistic Chair