SMU Professor of Operations Management Lim Yun Fong, SMU Associate Professor of Operations Management Fang Xin and another academic co-authored a paper, “Urban consolidation centre or peer-to-peer platform? The solution to urban last-mile delivery”, which was published in the journal Production and Operations Management. He shared that he was “thrilled” when the Financial Times told him his academic paper on last-mile delivery had been cited in a patent application by ecommerce company eBay, as it shows their research has some impact. He added, "It’s always more rewarding to work on research projects motivated by real settings in industry. It creates more opportunities for us to interact with industry, and means our students are more engaged when we share our research findings in the classroom.” The paper concluded that having a central location for deliveries in cities can be better than using a system where individual drivers respond to customer orders (placed on an app), collect the product from the shop/restaurant and deliver it to the customer’s address.
