NITL staff recently attended the annual conference of the International Purchasing and Supply Education and Research Association (IPSERA). This year’s event took place from April 5-8 and was hosted by the European Business School (EBS) located in the Rhinegau Region in Southern Germany.

IPSERA is a multi-disciplinary network of academics and practitioners dedicated to the development of knowledge concerning purchasing and supply management. It is the world’s biggest and most internationally oriented platform for researchers in this area. The annual conference provides exposure to some of the most recent developments in this field. The conference theme “Supply Management – towards an Academic Discipline?” attracted around 250 researchers from all over the world.

 
                      _{'Delegates at the recent IPSERA conference in Germany'}

NITL has a longstanding involvement in IPSERA and was involved in hosting the event in 1999. We were represented at this year’s event by Dr Claudia Wagner and Colm Ryan who is a graduate of NITL’s Executive Masters programme and who now works as a program manager at Apple Inc. based in Cork. The title of their paper was: Digital Supply Chains: Towards a Framework for Software Distribution by Colm Ryan (Apple Inc), Claudia-Maria Wagner (NITL), Edward Sweeney (NITL), Emilio Esposito (University of Naples “Federico II”) and Pietro Evangelista (University of Naples “Federico II”).

NITL sees continuous collaboration with industry and other leading academic institutions as a key element of its research endeavour. The paper presented at IPSERA is the result of ongoing joint research activity between NITL and the software industry, as well as with Italian academic partners.

Further information about the event is available at http://www.ipsera.com