Building collaborative engagement
The Office of Business Partnerships at Purdue University’s Mitch Daniels School of Business creates and provides solutions to the business challenges of today and the future.
Dedicated Daniels School professionals streamline opportunities for industry partners and alumni to connect with students and faculty beyond the traditional classroom setting. The partnerships office helps companies solve business challenges through consulting-focused experiential learning projects across all business functions via course-based engagements or contracts with our centers.
Applying the power of data to serve industry needs is in the Office of Business Partnerships’ DNA. Moving beyond theory into real problem-solving is a call to action our office takes seriously. We understand organizations large and small face uncertainty, rapid technological changes and the continuous need to train employees and cultivate new talent.
Let’s get started, together.
TOP 8
Public University in the U.S.
QS World University, 2025
TOP 10
Most Innovative Schools in the U.S.
7 Years Running
U.S. News & World Report, 2025
BRANDS THAT MATTER
For the 3rd year in a row, Purdue is the only university on Fast Company’s Brands That Matter list.
There are so many ways we can work together to create and nurture a rewarding partnership that benefits your organization. Explore the opportunities that make up the core of a strategic partnership with Purdue and the Daniels School.
Enhance your organization's leadership capacity by investing in their development through a residential, online or hybrid degree program, certificate courses or a custom offering.
Collaborate with our centers of excellence and expert faculty researchers to gain access to top thought leadership.
Develop future team members while filling your most challenging positions. Your next hire could be that talented intern, a stellar full-time candidate or a transformational executive you meet through a tailored recruitment strategy designed for your company.
Join forces with our expert faculty and top students to create a consulting project that will define and test solutions for your pain points.
Drive industry and academic innovation through board membership, mentoring, guest lectures and curricular guidance.
The industry partner heavily relies on external suppliers for critical IT and operations services. The performance and reliability of these suppliers can significantly impact the industry partner's operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and overall organizational success. Ensuring the quality and risk assessment of these suppliers is paramount to the industry partner.
Procurement lacks resources or tools to manage supplier risks and relies heavily on manual activities. The function also lacks a balanced scoring matrix to proactively manage supplier risk and relationships.
IT and operations services spends ~$1b annually across 2,300 suppliers (Tier 1: 36 suppliers with $0.7b spend, the remainder Tier 2-4)
The industry partner is seeking a comprehensive and data-driven model to build an IT and operations supplier risk qualification and evaluation model.
The project involves a comprehensive economic analysis of market dynamics, focusing on strategic decisions regarding classic diesel engines, batteries, and fuel cell systems. It covers demand and supply curves, revenue and profit calculations, oligopoly influences, government intervention impacts, and strategic investment decision-making.
In this engagement, you will be helping to improve the company partner's predictive spend and pricing analytics capabilities. The idea would be that they use our historic pricing trends (not tied to volume) by category to forecast what spending would look like 12-24 months out. This will likely include the need to input cost data from publications like CDI or IHS to analyze how trends in input costs correlate to our actual costs over time. We can then use that information to proactively buy or negotiate agreements based on where we feel costs are set to increase. This can also be used to budget more accurately or with more information.
Project success will be determined based on your ability to identify and provide empirical-based spend/pricing recommendations using models or analysis.
Academic and industry partnerships bring together the best of industry-specific and cutting-edge business knowledge to craft new and innovative ideas.
Mike Pettit
Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Wabash
