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The School of Business's Logistics Capstone: Future-proofing Supply Chains course tackles real-life business challenges. The course aims to bridge the gap between studies and future working life, enabling the application of the skills acquired during the degree to real business challenges. 

The business cases included in the course are linked to future challenges and risks in supply chains, for example climate change, geopolitical issues, and digitalisation. During the course, each group of students will work intensively on a company assignment and at the end of the course, students will present their solutions and recommendations for the future development of the supply chain to the company.

The S Group joined the course for the first time early this year. ‘We have worked together in the past on Master's theses, but we have not had this kind of course collaboration on e-commerce. The different functions of the S Group have certainly collaborated in many ways before,’ said Mira Korhonen, Business Developer, SOK Retail eCommerce and Jarkko Vippola, Senior Business Developer, Online Groceries at SOK.

Mira Korhonen knew the course's teacher, Professor Katri Kauppi, from her student days. They had been in touch last autumn, knowing where they both worked, and thought "this could be a good place to collaborate". A similar ‘good place’ was also identified at Reima and ABB, the other companies participating in the course.

Small changes in process increase efficiency

The project offered by S Group was very popular and was tackled by five groups, a total of 15 students. One group was formed by Baining Zhang, Mikaela Ebeling and Markus Broman.

Markus Broman, representing his group, explains that the task was to analyze and improve the store-picking process in Prisma stores to support S Group's growing e-commerce operations. The objective was to identify hidden best practices and to bring forward other process improvements that could be used to standardize the picking operations, while ensuring that the changes remained sustainable from an employee wellbeing perspective.’

‘The project gave us a good understanding of the order-to-delivery process in grocery e-commerce, particularly from the store operations level. One key takeaway was how small process changes or standardization efforts can significantly improve efficiency. We also learned that prioritizing quality over pure efficiency can, in many cases, lead to better overall performance. Within our team, we gained valuable project management skills by distributing the workload evenly while leveraging each member’s strengths. Overall, we were extremely happy to have successfully provided high-quality deliverables to the case company.’

Business representatives praise students and vice versa

Mira Korhonen and Jarkko Vippola from S Group say that each group presented their own observations, with both similarities and differences, which is interesting and valuable. ‘The students were outstanding. We had already thought about many of the issues raised by the students before this collaboration. The students' final reports and presentations have been a good impetus from outside the box to think about whether some things should be reconsidered. These are good observations that also refresh our own thinking.’

Markus Broman, representing his student group, commented that this project was a fantastic opportunity to apply our theoretical learnings in practice and gain experience in a consulting-like environment. ‘We would like to thank S Group for the opportunity to work on this case and extend our gratitude to Katri Kauppi for her valuable guidance throughout the project!’

Mira Korhonen and Jarkko Vippola from the S Group say that they were able to cooperate quite easily, which means that the course did not burden them too much. ‘Katri had organised and scheduled everything very well, so it was easy for us to participate. And since the students' input was of high quality, we came out on top. This collaboration also made a nice change from the normal days at the office. Initially we already talked about the possibility of continuing to work together on the logistics processes for the e-commerce.’