Building collaborative engagement
The Office of Business Partnerships at Purdue University’s Mitch Daniels School of Business creates and provides solutions to the business challenges of today and the future.
Dedicated Daniels School professionals streamline opportunities for industry partners and alumni to connect with students and faculty beyond the traditional classroom setting. The partnerships office helps companies solve business challenges through consulting-focused experiential learning projects across all business functions via course-based engagements or contracts with our centers.
Applying the power of data to serve industry needs is in the Office of Business Partnerships’ DNA. Moving beyond theory into real problem-solving is a call to action our office takes seriously. We understand organizations large and small face uncertainty, rapid technological changes and the continuous need to train employees and cultivate new talent.
Let’s get started, together.
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There are so many ways we can work together to create and nurture a rewarding partnership that benefits your organization. Explore the opportunities that make up the core of a strategic partnership with Purdue and the Daniels School.
Enhance your organization's leadership capacity by investing in their development through a residential, online or hybrid degree program, certificate courses or a custom offering.
Collaborate with our centers of excellence and expert faculty researchers to gain access to top thought leadership.
Develop future team members while filling your most challenging positions. Your next hire could be that talented intern, a stellar full-time candidate or a transformational executive you meet through a tailored recruitment strategy designed for your company.
Join forces with our expert faculty and top students to create a consulting project that will define and test solutions for your pain points.
Drive industry and academic innovation through board membership, mentoring, guest lectures and curricular guidance.
In this engagement, you will be helping to improve the company partner's predictive spend and pricing analytics capabilities. The idea would be that they use our historic pricing trends (not tied to volume) by category to forecast what spending would look like 12-24 months out. This will likely include the need to input cost data from publications like CDI or IHS to analyze how trends in input costs correlate to our actual costs over time. We can then use that information to proactively buy or negotiate agreements based on where we feel costs are set to increase. This can also be used to budget more accurately or with more information.
Project success will be determined based on your ability to identify and provide empirical-based spend/pricing recommendations using models or analysis.
This project addressed supply chain instability affecting a company in the energy and materials sector. Students were challenged to develop a strategic approach to improve the resilience of the company’s global supply chain network. The focus was on building transparency, diversifying sourcing, modernizing outdated systems and embedding proactive risk management practices to mitigate future disruptions and support sustainable growth. Two specific disruptions — a national rail strike and a fire at a supplier's facility — were used as case scenarios to analyze operational vulnerabilities and flow impacts.
The industry partner is a large welding equipment manufacturer with a low volume, high mix of machines. The current supply chain for welding machines has ≈ 13,000 unique parts across ≈ 800 different suppliers.
Currently, the industry partner runs quarterly delivery trend reports to review on-time delivery performance as part of our supplier scorecard system. The quarterly reporting is manually reviewed by the commodity managers and reflects a reactive approach to address delivery performance issues.
Academic and industry partnerships bring together the best of industry-specific and cutting-edge business knowledge to craft new and innovative ideas.
Mike Pettit
Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Wabash
Read the full story about our collaborative partnership with Wabash.
