Real life projects are key to ensuring high student satisfaction and engagement in the Teaching & Learning processes while leading also to enhancing their employability skills and industry-related experience, accomplishing thus the strategic objectives of the IF related to teaching. Through real-life projects, students become more eager to produce valuable/realistic outputs and gain empowerment and the sense of leadership (or at least micromanagement). Such projects can be achieved for example, via a strategic partnership between the University and a company (which is also a strategic objective of the IF). Through a strategic partnership, it is often the case that students will get access to tools, strategies and software required to perform their tasks, diversifying thus the spectrum of innovative teaching and learning approaches. This is the context which has driven the development of the “Olympia Electronics Challenge”.
Students (in pairs) receive individual challenges given directly by Olympia Electronics (manufacturer & exporter in 72 countries) and they have to act as consultants towards solving the specific challenge. As an example, the students were given different lightning devices and the goal was to understand what is the supply chain of that specific device in order to propose resource efficiency and optimization strategies.
In order to achieve this, students were asked to have one interview (per group) with the company in order to gather as much information as possible about the supply chain for their product as well as to research online catalogs and product specification books. When the supply chain was mapped, then the students had to use the SCEnATi tool (Supply Chain Environmental Analysis Tool www.scenat.com) in order to map the researched supply chain and calculate which process(es) of the supply chain are energy intensive. Based on the identified energy-intensive processes, they have to identify academic literature and business/consultancy case studies and to propose corrective measures that would help Olympia Electronics to achieve resource efficiency for the supply chain of that specific product.
Part 1 of the assignment was the delivery of a "consultancy" report (group) with the aforementioned findings & work and Part 2 - Individual presentation delivery in front of the company representatives (during a company visit at Olympia Electronics) - each student focusing on different strategies. This way students learn how to independently provide consultancy for "real" industry challenges by using independent research, business process modelling tools, while also gaining real life presentation skills and industry feedback. This strategic partnership was developed under the framework of the TrainERGY project (SEERC) which was used to support this university-industry collaboration (EU funding).
Students benefit for the project as follows:
Adrian Solomon
Students (in pairs) receive individual challenges given directly by Olympia Electronics (manufacturer & exporter in 72 countries) and they have to act as consultants towards solving the specific challenge. As an example, the students were given different lightning devices and the goal was to understand what is the supply chain of that specific device in order to propose resource efficiency and optimization strategies.
In order to achieve this, students were asked to have one interview (per group) with the company in order to gather as much information as possible about the supply chain for their product as well as to research online catalogs and product specification books. When the supply chain was mapped, then the students had to use the SCEnATi tool (Supply Chain Environmental Analysis Tool www.scenat.com) in order to map the researched supply chain and calculate which process(es) of the supply chain are energy intensive. Based on the identified energy-intensive processes, they have to identify academic literature and business/consultancy case studies and to propose corrective measures that would help Olympia Electronics to achieve resource efficiency for the supply chain of that specific product.
Part 1 of the assignment was the delivery of a "consultancy" report (group) with the aforementioned findings & work and Part 2 - Individual presentation delivery in front of the company representatives (during a company visit at Olympia Electronics) - each student focusing on different strategies. This way students learn how to independently provide consultancy for "real" industry challenges by using independent research, business process modelling tools, while also gaining real life presentation skills and industry feedback. This strategic partnership was developed under the framework of the TrainERGY project (SEERC) which was used to support this university-industry collaboration (EU funding).
Students benefit for the project as follows:
- they receive practical consulting & presentation skills with direct industry feedback;
- they experiment the real world (in this case of manufacturing by seeing the actual manufacturing process and understanding all the stages);
- they gain experience to work in a corporate/professional sector where the contact time is limited (i.e. to get accustomed with the idea that they cannot ask questions/support non-stop);
- they become familiar with specialized environmental sustainability software that can enrich their CV and experience for their future careers by showing additional digital and intersdisciplinary skills;
Adrian Solomon
Lecturer, BAED
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