Digital Transformation Towards Integration

The application of digital capabilities to processes, goods, and assets to improve efficiency, provide customer value, manage risk, and navigate through new income creation opportunities is known as digital transformation. This is a worldwide transition that necessitates the adoption of digital technology for both internal and external activities, including sales, marketing, and support. Companies must fundamentally restructure how they function, accept cultural change, and reconsider their status quo in order to adapt. The transformation and exploitation of new business strategy possibilities require digital talent and competencies.

The post-pandemic environment we now inhabit is fostering a digital fever mindset. Companies that build smart experiences and customer journeys that facilitate and/or complement people's lives will prosper. Companies that fail will be those that do not attempt to profit from emerging AI technologies and do not use data to predict demand patterns and make workforce-improvement decisions. 90% of businesses are now operating in the cloud. Many firms are replicating old services in a digital version as they shift data to the cloud. On the other hand, true digital transformation entails much more: The creation of a technological framework to funnel these services and data into actionable insights that can enhance just about every aspect of a business may be revolutionary for a digital transformation.

Consequently, our research group has been working on optimising integrated problems, e.g., supply chain embedded project scheduling. Although there has been significant research into project management and supply chain management (SCM), each has been studied independently. In reality, however, project and supply chain management are inter-dependent for two main reasons: (a) projects depend on input supply chains for the resources (e.g., workforce, machines, and materials) required to execute project activities; and (b) the ultimate project outputs are delivered through output supply chain networks. Thus, without proper synchronisation between the activities in a project and their supply chains, project managers and supply chain managers may optimise their individual sub-networks independently, which will invariably lead to sub-optimality of the overall network, which in turn increases operating costs, increases the risk of delay in project execution and completion, and reduces ultimate customer satisfaction. Our research outcomes have enabled practitioners to concurrently optimise both supply chain drivers and project schedule attributes to maximise supply chain profit. The obvious benefit of our research is to develop an optimal logistical plan to effectively deliver the suitable materials to the right time to the right customer by minimising project tardiness and unnecessary overruns. It will also increase the local and global supply chain responsiveness and resiliency, which will help boost national economies by minimising project and material delivery delays. This project will also enhance the resiliency of a global supply chain, which is currently one of the “National Security Challenges” as per the Department of Defence, National Security Science and Technology Centre (NSSTC).
 

Impact

Our research is aimed at delivering:

1. Optimal logistical plan to effectively deliver the suitable materials to the right time to the right customer by minimising project tardiness and unnecessary overruns
2. Enhance data collection, which can translate raw data into insights across various touchpoints
3. Stronger resource management by ensuring better traceability across multiple tiers
4. Data-driven customer-centric insights for better process innovation and efficiency
5. Improved utilisation of artificial intelligence and evolutionary algorithms while solving complex supply chain embedded project scheduling problems.
    

Competitive advantage

Our research group bring together experts with remarkable track records in Cross-disciplinary research areas (such as supply chain management, network science, evolutionary algorithms, artificial intelligence business modelling, and simulation & modelling). We have long-standing experience in working with different project scheduling problems and then, consecutively, solving them by different advanced evolutionary algorithms. We can help organisations to better understand their capacity system and how it may lead to enhanced outputs and results, starting with the assumption that the focus should be on achieving high performance. Our emphasis on collaborating with organisations and doing applied research helps practitioners get the information and skills they need to put our research results into practice. The research team has extensive experience designing and implementing funded research from the ARC, industry partners, and other sources. We ensure that for any potential project design, the composition of the research team and the budget required for that project will reflect a concerted effort to calibrate a project that accounts for common project risks. In addition, we endeavour to communicate our findings to the public using local and national online news and communication platforms such as LinkedIn and other social media. Through UNSW, this research group has access to the supercomputer at National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), which is used to develop and test the developed algorithms. We have the necessary office space, access to information and library resources necessary to carry out any possible research matters.