Kees Jan Roodbergen Professor of Quantitative Logistics

Kees Jan Roodbergen has been appointed Professor of Quantitative Logistics at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, as of February 1st. The field of quantitative logistics uses techniques from the fields of Operations Research and Operations Management to resolve logistics problems.

Roodbergen has a special interest in: the logistics for internet sales, the logistics of temperature-controlled food products, facility design, and the influence of human factors in production and logistics.

Internet Logistics

Professor Roodbergen is the principal investigator in a project on 'Internet Logistics'. From a logistics point of view, the current increase in internet sales has an enormous impact. Deliveries to traditional bricks-and-mortar stores can be made in relatively large quantities at regular intervals. Consumers then buy the products in the store and provide an important logistics service: they transport their own products to their own homes for free. With the internet, products are ordered in small quantities by individual consumers and the web store has to arrange for transporting the products to the consumers' home address. It is almost needless to say that this significantly increases logistics efforts in the supply chain.

The title of the project in which Roodbergen is principal investigator is "cross chain order fulfilment coordination for internet sales". It is subsidised by the logistics research institute Dinalog and sponsored by a consortium of industry partners. In this project, new concepts, models and solution methods are being developed for innovations in the logistics processes for internet order delivery.

 

Resume

Before joining the University of Groningen, Kees Jan Roodbergen was Associate Professor at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and visiting researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He obtained aM.Sc. degree in Econometrics and Operations Research from the University of Groningen and a Ph.D. degree from Erasmus University Rotterdam. His publications have appeared in international scientific journals such as Operations Research, Interfaces, IIE Transactions and European Journal of Operational Research.

Roodbergen serves on the Scientific Advisory Council of the World Food Logistics Organization, an organization that represents 3500 companies specialised in handling cooled and frozen food products. Next to that he is a member of the College-Industry Council on Material Handling Education in the USA. This council is affiliated with the Material Handling Industry of America (800 companies) and facilitates the information interchange between industry and academia. Roodbergen's solution approaches have been successfully applied at a number of companies. His teaching activities span the whole spectrum of Operations Management, logistics and Supply Chain Management at all levels.