| Project title | PERSIST: Purchasing Education Research Syndicate: Industry 4.0 Skills Transfer |
| Dates | September 2019 – August 2022 |
| Project website | www.project-persist.eu/ |
| Funding source | Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships – European Commission |
| People involved | Dr Stephen Kelly (Business School), Dr Peter Vangorp (Computer Science) |
| Description | In the modern network economy, over half of a firm’s income is directly routed through to its suppliers. Therefore, the competitiveness of a firm’s Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) is critical for those firms and also for wider European competitiveness. This necessitates world class PSM training and education. Since the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution (I4.0), cyber-physical systems with autonomous machine-to-machine communication are re-shaping parts of our economy and PSM is one of the areas that is most strongly affected. The skill set PSM professionals need to manage and organise such systems and to efficiently prevail in an I4.0 world is therefore changing. Within education, as well as in industry, there is now a strong demand for direction on how to manage this change in and how to educate and prepare the current and future PSM workforce. The aim and innovation of the PERSIST project lies in: a) identifying those skills which are needed to be added to the profile of a European PSM professional through the development of an I4.0 PSM Skill framework and b) developing a module-based course for higher education to teach these skills and c) to develop gamification and playful interaction oriented teaching and learning elements in a student-centered approach, including a gamified massive open online course (MOOC). Project PERSIST is coordinated by the University of Twente (Netherlands) and consists of partners across another four countries, Technical University of Dortmund (Germany); Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (Finland), Edge Hill University (United Kingdom) and University of Economics in Bratislava (Slovakia). |