“CBRE wanted to get a closer understanding of what is, these days, a very fast evolving supply chain landscape. Being the world’s largest commercial property company makes it critical that we continue to work on our understanding of our customers’ needs and so we sought out the best guidance and support that we could get.

The Supply Chain Academy developed a workshop for us which took us into the DNA of the modern and emerging supply chains. With their help we looked into the experience of today’s supply chain challenges from a customer’s perspective and this helped us to understand how our work, the provision of warehousing assets, plays its role.

We looked at the entire span of the supply chain – from factory to delivery into the customers’ hands and back. We covered the complex challenges of omni-channel retailing, just in time manufacturing, the critical disciplines of inventory management and how all those things impact on property.

And the really exciting thing was that we decided to do this with and alongside our investor and development partner customers; to share in collaborative learning. That close and intense learning experience with them was invaluable in adding to what was an outstanding workshop.

As a facility the Supply Chain Academy is quite superb, there are few places like it. It’s a fantastic Edwardian building which has been gloriously restored with great teaching spaces, wonderful bedroom accommodation and great food; we continued in to the evening with a fine dinner whilst getting insights from the visiting speaker from one of the UK’s major omni-channel retailers.

The insights from that workshop have been invaluable to us; we saw benefit from what we learned almost immediately and the experience continues to pay dividends. The facilitation from Professor Alan Braithwaite was informed, challenging and great fun.”