Hunt’s $2.75M to set up UA hub
Industry research will be the focus
J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. and the University of Arkansas are creating the J.B. Hunt Innovation Center of Excellence by way of a $2.75 million investment from the Lowell trucking company.
It is one of the largest industry-sponsored research grants the university has received, university officials said.
The program will start with enough staff and funding to support two to four interdisciplinary projects per year over five years related to supply-chain technology innovation. It will be managed by a steering committee of leadership from the company, the College of Engineering and the Sam M. Walton College of Business.
In a video message, J.B. Hunt chief executive John Roberts spoke about the importance of remaining a “disruptor” in one’s own industry, especially for companies like J.B. Hunt that may already be the “incumbent” others are looking to disrupt.
“How is the market disrupting, or attempting to disrupt, the way that our customers buy their services? Well, we can either sit and wait until they come knocking on our door, or we can go and understand that better and, with our strength, present our own disruption,” he
said in the video from WorkMatters, an organization dedicated to helping people incorporate their religious beliefs into their work lives.
Stuart Scott, J.B. Hunt’s chief information officer and member of the Innovation Center’s steering committee, said the center “will allow us to pursue revolutionary ideas in supply-chain technology that can have a game-changing impact on the industry.”
Tracy Black, senior vice president of information systems at J.B. Hunt, has been leading discussions about the center and will continue to be heavily involved as it progresses.
Black is a graduate of the university and serves on its computing academy and Information Technology Research Institute executive boards.
The center also will feature an annual symposium, which Black said will be “an externally focused showcase to spotlight ongoing and developed technology-driven supply chain solutions and emerging technologies.”
Matthew Waller, dean of the Walton College and member of the steering committee, said that the relationship between the college and the company really started ramping up in 2015 through an in-house executive education conference for the company’s sales executives. Now, he said, what is known as the J.B. Hunt University is “multifaceted thought leadership programming” run by the Walton College for the company’s management.
“Now, J.B. Hunt is saying to us, ‘We like what you’re doing from an innovation and research perspective. We’d like to you take it to the next level, and we’d like you to collaborate with the College of Engineering,’” he said.
Waller compared the partnership to the McMillon Innovation Studio, a retail innovation center at the university’s Center for Retailing Excellence, just with a specific focus on logistics.
Black said the Innovation Center’s projects “will be grounded by user experience and market validation” and will emphasize the targeting of “operational efficiency; new business or adjacent markets; and/or, disruption.”
The first projects planned, Black said, “are geared towards applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to build proactive, predictive, intelligent supply-chain systems.” She pointed to one example of building algorithms to create a “digital dispatcher system” to optimize the process of matching a load to a driver for the best price.
“When you work with a company who’s depending on this work to help them further their corporate mission,” much research is “kept confidential,” said Heather Nachtmann, associate dean for research at the College of Engineering. This involves both information provided by the company to ground the research and any research product, which becomes property of the company, she said.
The university still will be able to publish papers on the research, which Waller called a “win-win.”
“Giving our faculty and students the opportunity to work on industry research is just invaluable, because it helps the faculty to understand challenges in a real-world setting, and it helps students to train in an environment where they’re ready to go to work,” she said.
Plus, Waller added, “It will help [J.B. Hunt] attract great students.”
In a video message, J.B. Hunt chief executive John Roberts spoke about the importance of remaining a “disruptor” in one’s own industry, especially for companies like J.B. Hunt that may already be the “incumbent” others are looking to disrupt.