Logistics education: MIT-CTL rolls out Global SCALE Network

Jeff Berman, Senior Editor, Logistics Management -- Supply Chain Management Review, 3/31/2008

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics (MIT-CTL) announced today it has launched the MIT Global SCALE (Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence) Network, which it describes as an international alliance of leading research and education centers dedicated to the development of supply chain and logistics through innovation.

The Global SCALE Network is comprised of the MIT-CTL, the Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC) in Zaragoza, Spain, and the Center for Latin-American Logistics Innovation (CLI) in Bogota, Colombia. A main focus of this initiative, according to the MIT-CTL, is to allow faculty, researchers, students and affiliated companies from all three organizations to leverage their collective expertise and “collaborate on projects that will create supply chain and logistics innovations with global applications.”

In an interview with LM, MIT-CTL Director Yossi Sheffi said that the Global SCALE Network makes sense on various levels, because there is no “monopoly” on good ideas. And he said this is something that will provide a nice framework for its stakeholders to learn from one another.

“It will really create a network of many organizations,” said Sheffi. “Each center is connected to many other organizations. What we have now is three nodes of a network, and each one of them is connected to many other organizations.”

The MIT-CTL alone is connected to more than 50 academic, government, and corporate entitities throughout North America, said Sheffi. The Zargoza Logistics Center has the same framework in Europe, and CLI is connected with dozens of similar organizations throughout Latin America.

While these centers are a starting point, Sheffi did admit that the research and collaboration the Global SCALE Network is striving for is not something that will happen overnight, because of different academic cycles, staffing, and curriculum, along with how research and educational activities are tied into commercial activities.

He added that going forward the network may add centers in Africa—focused on working with emerging economies and pharmaceutical distribution—and Southeast Asia—which may be located in China or India.

Regarding how the Global SCALE Network members will collaborate, Sheffi cited how ten years from now the network will ideally have thousands of graduates that are connected to each other and know each other and learned together.

“The first order of business is to create an alumni network around the world,” said Sheffi. “The second order is to create commercial value between the MIT-CTL, ZLC, and CLI, because they all collaborate with many different companies. This is another opportunity to communicate and create on a commercial level through things like conferences and seminars to collaborate and share ideas.” (This type of collaboration is occurring today at the MIT-CTL’s annual Crossroads conference, The Next 10 Years in Supply Chain).

In terms of project collaboration occurring through the Global SCALE Network, Sheffi referred to a drug distribution initiative for emerging economies—particularly in Africa. This project is being led by a Spain-based researcher and MIT researchers, and Harvard Medical School.

“This network of researchers will collaborate and focus on learning what the best solution is for drug distribution by bringing the power of the network together to get drugs to the patients and hospitals that need them the most,” said Sheffi. “It is a logistics or a supply chain problem more than a medical problem.”

Another example of collaboration cited by Sheffi was how students on different continents can collaborate on a project whether it is writing a paper of solving a problem together.

He also said that the PLAZA Logistics Park in Zaragoza, Spain—the largest logistics park in Europe with more than 300 logistics and distribution companies—is where the ZLC is located. The reason this location is significant, noted Sheffi is that rather than putting the laboratory in the university, it is putting the laboratory in the university to provide a real-world learning and collaborative experience.

The CLI has a similar operation with LOGyCA, a Colombia-based logistics services provider, which is comprised of a supply chain and logistics education and research center at LOGyCA’s headquarters in Bogota, Colombia. Sheffi said this facility has a simulated supermarket, corner store, hospital, and warehouse, where users can implement their software and see how it would work in a real-time environment.

“These are examples of what the global locations are bringing into the network,” said Sheffi. “It is not just the MIT-CTL exporting its resources. The idea is that when we work together and collaborate the parts are bigger than the sum.”

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