Sasin to draw on expertise of Cambridge's Institute for Manufacturing

“I think universities in Thailand can learn a lot from the IfM model,” Assistant Professor Chaipong Pongpanich, director of Sasin’s Research and Management Consulting Centre, said yesterday.

“Thai universities tend to be quite removed from industry and business. Sometimes there is a lack of collaboration with business and industry, when in fact universities feed industry with talent, especially from business and engineering schools. The IfM model is really quite effective and is something that would make a good case study,” he said. 

“It is a great opportunity for Sasin to learn from one of the best universities in the world. IfM can share its knowledge and experience with us, and then we can adapt it to the local or regional market. That will help us deliver for our clients.”

Professor Mike Gregory, head of manufacturing and management at Cambridge University’s engineering department and head of the IfM, said the IfM business model gave faculty and researchers the opportunity to engage with practice and to get research out into the hands of the people who can use them.

Founded in 1998, the IfM takes a distinctive, cross-disciplinary approach, bringing together expertise in management, technology and policy to address the full spectrum of industrial issues. 

It has 230 staff and research students as well as 100 baccalaureate and master’s students.

“Our objective is to really understand industrial systems. Traditionally, industrial systems have been studied in silos, by engineers, by business schools, by economists, but without talking to each other. So on our faculty, we have scientists and engineers, but also management experts and economists, and they do talk to each other.

“At IfM, we can assemble genuinely multidisciplinary teams, and we all actually like industry and business, so we can integrate research and education with practical applications in business and industry,” Gregory said. 

“We started from experience in industry and having a sense of what the generic problems were. So we started with manufacturing operations and manufacturing strategy, at a time when people thought ‘manufacturing strategy’ was ‘get a better lathe’, when actually what you’re trying to do is organise a manufacturing system to meet the business requirements of cost, quality, delivery, flexibility and so on. 

“The first projects we did led to a ‘Book for Industry’ that sold quite well,” Gregory said.

“That all led to a strategic initiative. It turns out that the kind of research that we did – understanding the theoretical underpinnings, then going to work with several companies on that particular task, manufacturing strategy for instance, and then distilling the lessons from the practice, putting them together and enriching the theory, and then putting that into a workbook that an ordinary person or manufacturing team can read and put into practice.

“You can make the information very accessible and usable, rather than publishing it in some obscure academic journal. So that’s what we do.” 

Sasin, Sasin Management Consulting (SMC) and IfM will share ideas and opportunities. IfM is interested in working in a different market and has some resources that may be useful to SMC. 

“Given that there is a whole world of opportunity and interest here, where Bangkok is clearly a major hub, and if you want to say anything serious about the manufacturing industry, it has to be a global conversation, it seems to me that this is a place where we need to be,” Gregory said. 

“We have an established structure in the UK that works, and the next step is deciding how to develop further. Clearly, it’s necessary to find partners, to have a group of institutional friends to work with on a long-term basis. So yes, this is very strategic for us and we’re quite happy to start with our friends here at Sasin.”