On September 11 and 12, our team welcomed Peter Scharbert from A.T. Kearney in the course on “Supply Management” (BSc-Program). In interactive sessions, Peter Scharbert shared detailed insights on the practical use of “The Purchasing ChessboardTM”, a tool developed by A.T. Kearney for deriving and implementing purchasing strategies. Based on four strategies, the Purchasing ChessboardTM derives 16 approaches and distinguishes 64 methods to work with suppliers to reduce costs, increase value, and mitigate supply risks. After introducing the approach, course participants had the opportunity to practically apply their newly-acquired methodological knowledge using sanitized case studies from previous A.T. Kearney consulting projects and to discuss their results in class with the guest.
Peter Scharbert is a Vice President at A.T. Kearney and has been working for the firm since 1999, focusing on procurement-related topics. A.T. Kearney is an international strategic management consultancy with strong expertise in procurement. The firm is currently located in 40 countries and has a workforce of roughly 3,500 employees.
Guest sessions are a key element in the research-based and practice-focused supply management courses at WHU. Across industries, companies ‘invest’ 50% of what they earn on the sales side into their suppliers. Selecting cost-competitive, innovative, and flexible suppliers is therefore essential for buying companies. Against this background, it is only logical that at WHU, one of the leading business schools in Europe, supply management is a compulsory core course in its BSc-Program. WHU’s leading position in SCM research results in innovative and empirically based course contents. Content-rich field trips and guest sessions with experienced practitioners are carefully integrated into the overall flow of each course to maximize the learning impact for all students.