Audi Establishes Endowed Chair for Logistics

INGOLSTADT, GERMANY – March 18, 2011: Yesterday evening, in cooperation with the German industry initiative Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft e.V., Audi founded an endowed chair at the Technical University of Dortmund. The endowment is aimed at promoting research, teaching and scholarly advancement in the field of Supply Net Order Management, a branch of logistics.

“For logistics, funding for young academics represents an important long-term investment in the future,” emphasized Dr. Ernst-Hermann Krog, Head of Brand Logistics at AUDI AG. In a comprehensive approach to logistics research, the disciplines of engineering sciences, information technology and economics will be taught with a focus on fundamental aspects and applications. The endowed chair has been allocated a yearly budget of €100,000 and will remain in place for five years.

The cooperation will help to establish an interdisciplinary research center at TU Dortmund and to give an even firmer grounding to logistics as an independent discipline in science and teaching. Bachelor’s and Master’s programs will be offered there.

For the past five years, Audi has already been applying the results of intensive research in this field. In the logistics laboratory at the Ingolstadt site, young researchers are finding answers to important issues in modern automotive logistics.

The results of their research are making a significant contribution to the continuous optimization of logistics flows at all Audi sites. “We have had extremely good results with our in-house logistics laboratory,” said Krog: “That was one reason we continue to be fully committed to research and teaching.”