Business Administration (Supply Chain Management), DBA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On the first Monday of every month I print a list that nobody at work enjoys reading. It shows every line in our warehouse that will expire within ninety days. In a medical-supplies wholesaler that means wound dressings, catheters, syringes and sterile packs, items that cannot simply be discounted and pushed out of the door. For six years as an inventory planner I have tried to make that list shorter without letting the other list, the one showing items customers ordered and we could not supply, grow longer. Living between those two lists has shaped the questions I now want to study at doctoral level.

My first degree was a BSc in Business and Logistics. My dissertation looked at safety stock for a family of foam dressings sold to community nursing teams. Using two years of anonymised order data supplied by a local distributor, I compared the textbook safety-stock formula, which assumes demand is roughly normal and lead times are stable, with what actually happened. Demand was lumpy, driven by a few large orders from clinics restocking at once, and supplier lead times stretched sharply each winter. The formula consistently set buffers too low in December and too high in summer. My conclusions were modest, and my statistical methods were basic, but the project taught me how much depends on whether a model's assumptions match the behaviour of real customers.

At work I have had the chance to test that idea on a larger scale. I review reorder points for around four hundred lines, agree forecasts with our purchasing manager and explain shortfalls to the customer service team. Two years ago I noticed that several of our hospital customers ordered in large, irregular batches after their own stock counts, while our orders to manufacturers amplified those swings further. Reading the 1997 article by Lee, Padmanabhan and Whang on the bullwhip effect gave me language for what I was seeing: order batching and shortage gaming were both present in our data. I proposed a small trial in which two customers shared weekly usage figures instead of placing monthly orders. The trial was limited and my manager made the final decisions, but on those lines we needed fewer emergency deliveries over the following six months. What interested me more than the result was why other customers declined to take part. Their reasons concerned trust, workload and internal budgeting rather than technology, and I could find little practical guidance on those barriers.

That gap is what I hope to research. I would like to examine how information-sharing arrangements between healthcare buyers and distributors are negotiated and sustained, and under what conditions they reduce waste from expiry as well as stockouts. I expect to need far stronger quantitative methods than I currently have, alongside qualitative approaches such as structured interviews, and I would welcome training in both. I am particularly aware that my experience comes from one company in one sector; a doctorate would require me to test whether my observations hold more widely.

Outside work, two commitments keep me grounded. I ring church bells most weeks, a hobby that relies on everyone in the band knowing their place in a sequence, and I have learnt to call simple methods, which means watching six people and correcting mistakes calmly. On Saturday mornings I sort donations at a local food bank. It is unrelated to my career, though I admit I could not resist suggesting that tins be shelved by best-before date rather than by type.

I am applying for a professional doctorate because I want my research to remain tied to practice. I intend to continue working while I study, and I hope to bring data, questions and a practitioner's scepticism to the programme, and to take back to my industry evidence that is more rigorous than the instincts I have relied on so far.