Digital supply chain and operations excellence for the UK economy

This inaugural lecture will argue that the UK economy is heavily reliant on managing supply chain and operations towards excellence for better resilience, efficiency and sustainability.

The new era of advanced technology and social and human factors play a significant role to make this happen in a better way in the future.

Professor Alireza Shokri will outline how businesses, alongside academic institutions, are obliged to facilitate this integration through research and development opportunities.

About the Speaker

Alireza Shokri is the Professor of digital operations and supply chain excellence and the head of the subject group of "Operations, Supply Chain and Logistics Management" in the Department of Operations, Marketing and Systems. He is also Director of the "Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence" at Northumbria University. He is also the member of the Academic Advisory Board for the UK National Digitlal Supply Chain Programme.

Prior to the current position, Professor Shokri was programme leader for the BA (Hon) International Business Management Programme. Before joining Newcastle Business School in 2011, he had different practitioner roles including supply chain manager, quality manager, and ISO9001 internal consultant in food sector. He got his first degree in Agriculture Engineering in University of Zanjan, Iran followed by MSc in Food Technology in 2001 in Teesside University in the UK. He completed his PhD in Lean Six Sigma application within food distribution SMEs in 2011 in Teesside University in the UK.

A passionate teacher and researcher, Professor Shokri is very active in action research and research/enterprise development activities.

He is co-lead of the "Decision making: Analytics, Operations and Marketing" Research Group and is currently working with leading organisations such as UK National Health Services (NHS) and many other local and national SMEs and large organisations in the service and manufacturing sector.