This semester, my MBA Supply Chain Relationships Class is already off to the races! Students in this class engage with our partner companies to complete a procurement-related project over the course of the semester, while learning the major facets of category management, supply market intelligence, supplier assessment, negotiation, contract management, and supplier relationship management. The projects are developed through our Supply Chain Resource Cooperative, a thought-leadership center focused on improvement of supply chain performance. Many of the projects this semester are unsurprisingly focused on applications of AI to purchasing, improving the source to pay process, and benchmarking of logistics performance. Here are the projects currently underway;

• Source to Pay: This project will evaluate the current S2P user experience at a large company across the S2P galaxy flow, focusing on the intake process and Make a Purchase form, and redesign it to enable faster, more intuitive, and compliant buying. Students will identify friction points and design business-configured intake and catalog pathways that differentiate between repeat, contract-enabled purchases and complex requests.
• NC state freight benchmarks – The project will focus on North Carolina’s statewide supply chain ecosystem, with benchmarking against a defined set of peer and competitor states in the Southeast and other leading logistics and manufacturing regions. The analysis will be conducted at a state-level, with attention to major freight corridors, ports, airports, and key industrial regions where relevant.
• NC Dept of Acquisition: Students will assess current procurement card (P-card) processes at the State of North Carolina DOA. Assess if and how an emerging procurement technology (Blue Bean) could help improve / simplify the State’s p-card processes. Students will develop a business case with ROI (quantified benefits and costs over time), including scope for a small bounded pilot.
• RFQ automation: Students will create an agent / process to digest complex RFQ documents and requirements and first pass supplier responses to the RFX to: 1) check for completeness of answers to required questions and templates. 2) initial cost summary / comparison / ranking. 3) High level sourcing / supply chain mapping of responses. 4) Suggest opportunities for negotiation strategy with vendors based on their initial responses
• Compliance Agent: Students will write a CoPilot Agent to assist with compliance related research for identifying or improving parts descriptions, hazmat identification, and HTS classification consistency for the company’s parts database.
• Consolidation Planning: Analyze historical shipment and freight spend data to identify opportunities to consolidate dispenser shipments into truckload movements and develop a scalable freight program for high-volume customers. This company has established preferred freight forwarders for export shipments; however, non-preferred forwarders continue to be utilized in certain situations. The organization lacks visibility into the frequency, drivers, cost impacts, service implications, and compliance risks associated with these exceptions.
• Aftermarket Parts: Define a process to develop purchasing strategic business plans for aftermarket based on benchmarks (market) and internal best practices.
• Indirect Procurement Metrics: Currently, this company’s indirect purchasing team does not have a way to measure if projects are delivered on time. This team will review current systems, data available and create a process and method to measure on-time performance.
• Feed the Pack: During the 2025-2026 academic year, Feed the Pack recorded 16,320 visits and distributed 231,963 pounds of food. The pantry received 179,643 pounds in donations and additional food was sourced through purchases from the Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC, US Foods, Restaurant Depot, and grocery gift cards. Food purchasing for the pantry accounted for 10.6% of total Pack Essentials expenditures during that period. The objective of this project is to better understand weekly, monthly, and semesterly purchasing patterns, pricing trends of items frequently purchased, spending changes on a semesterly basis, and the relationship between procurement activity, food donations received by the pantry, and pantry utilization, as measured by food distributed and patron visits. This will be done by analyzing three years of historical procurement data from FtP’s major food vendors.

I want to thank our partner company representatives for making these project experiences available to our students. We expect they will deliver great value to your organizations!