DDM Service and Supply Chain Management postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every morning at half past seven I rewrite a whiteboard at the boiler repair company where I work. It lists customers whose engineer could not finish a job the day before, usually because a part was missing. On a cold week the board can hold thirty names, and each one represents a household without heating or hot water while we wait for a valve or a circuit board to arrive. Keeping that board short has become the most interesting problem in my working life, and it is the reason I want to study service and supply chain management at postgraduate level.

I graduated with a 2:1 in Industrial Engineering. The modules I enjoyed most were operations research and inventory theory, where I first worked through the economic order quantity model and the newsvendor problem. I found them satisfying because they turned an argument about how much to hold into a question with a defensible answer, while making the assumptions visible. My dissertation used discrete-event simulation to examine staffing at a busy community pharmacy. With the owner's permission I timed arrivals and service across twelve weekday shifts, built a model in Python, and compared rota patterns. The main finding was modest but useful: moving one assistant's break away from the lunchtime peak reduced average waiting more than adding an extra part-time hour at the end of the day. The owner adopted the change, and I learned how much a model depends on careful, unglamorous data collection.

After graduating I joined the repair firm as a service desk coordinator. I book appointments, allocate jobs to eleven engineers and order parts from two distributors. I have no authority over purchasing policy, but I noticed that a small number of parts caused most of our return visits. Over three months I kept a spreadsheet of every incomplete job and its cause, then grouped parts by how often they were needed and how long suppliers took to deliver them. I presented this to my manager, and we agreed a trial in which engineers' vans carry an extra diverter valve and two common pumps. Return visits for those parts fell noticeably during the trial, although I am aware that a mild autumn may have helped, and I would like the methods to judge that properly.

This is where I feel the limits of my current knowledge. Our business is a service network rather than a factory: demand is seasonal and uncertain, a stockout means an unhappy customer at home, and van stock competes with what the warehouse holds. I have started reading about spare parts and after-sales logistics, including work on intermittent demand forecasting such as Croston's method, and I want to understand how service levels, inventory and engineer capacity can be planned together rather than separately. I am also curious about how data from connected boilers might allow faults to be predicted before a visit is booked.

Outside work, I spend two evenings a week with my grandfather, who lives alone and needs help with shopping and medication. Organising his prescriptions, which arrive from a pharmacy on a fixed cycle, has made me more patient with systems that look simple from outside and are fiddly in practice. I also sing tenor in a community choir, where I help the librarian keep track of borrowed scores; it is a pleasant reminder that not everything needs optimising.

I am applying now because I have a clear set of questions drawn from real work, a quantitative grounding to build on, and the habit of checking numbers before trusting them. I would bring practical experience of what happens when a supply chain meets a customer's front door, and I hope to leave with the rigour to design better service systems, whether in maintenance, healthcare supply or another field where reliability matters to ordinary people.