Prof. Dr. Frank-Dieter Dorloff | Procurement, Logistics and Information Management

Personal Details

Professor Dorloff studied Communications Engineering (Dipl.-Ing.) and Economic Engineering (Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Ing.) at the RWTH Aachen (Technical University). On completion of his studies, he worked as an academic assistant in the Research Institute of Economization (FIR). He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the RWTH Aachen in 1975 with a thesis on "Development of an EDP-based planning model for a combined production scheduling and execution planning at market-oriented multi-level batch production". Then, he became full professor in the BWL faculty at the University of Essen to hold the chair of production and cost. In 1998 he was appointed as a full professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen to hold the chair of procurement, logistics and information management.

Teaching

The field takes part in training in the studies economic informatics, systems engineering, business administration, medicine management, political economy and in the continuing education studies Public Transport Management. Professor Dorloff and his team work on concepts and solutions for the design of inter-operational systems, in particular B2B e-commerce applications such as e-procurement systems and electronic marketplaces. Its focus is the standardization of business data and transactions, the development of XML-based data exchange formats as well as the management of catalogue data.
The field offers two main teaching focuses, which are the special business administration "procurement, logistics and information management" (BLI) and the special economic informatics "information systems in procurement and logistics" (ISBL). In both main focuses the question of the planning and the control of the operational procurement and logistics as well as their support by information systems are discussed. A special focus lies on the inter-coordination between buyers, suppliers and logistics service providers. While in the field of BLI are treated above all to organizational aspects of the procurement and logistics, in the field of ISBL the supporting information systems with its design parameters and the underlying technologies are at the centre.

Research

Procurement, logistics and information management are vital tasks for many companies in the era of globalisation and networking markets. The field of BLI interdisciplinary works on questions of the process-oriented design of logistics and information systems in various industries and organizations. Internet technologies will play a key role in this regard. Professor Dorloff’s main research areas are the fields of e-business, e-procurement and e-government.
Selected recent research projects have been:

  • CEN/ISSS EEG1 Project Team c-Catalogue
  • Research group "Economic Traffic in Urban Centres"
  • CEN/ISSS ePDC - Global Product Description/Classification for eCommerce and eBusiness
  • CEN/ISSS eCAT Workshop - Multilingual eCataloguing and eClassification in eBusiness
  • openTRANS – Standardization of business transactions
  • BMEcat - XML-Standard for the exchange of electronic product catalogues

Aside from the chairmanship of the board of BME (Federal Association of Procurement) in the Ruhr region, Prof. Dorloff is also a board member of various other organisations such as BMEnet GmbH (Frankfurt), the eBusiness Standardization Committee, the Ruhrnetworker e.V. and the Bundesvereinigung Logistik (Federal Association of Logistics).
Professor Dorloff has authored numerous scientific publications which appeared in refereed journals. Likewise, he reviews on behalf of the renowned magazine "International Journal of Interoperability in Business Information Systems" and has cooperated with companies like Bayer, BMW, Deutsche Telekom, SAP, Siemens, cc-hubwoo, Unternehmensberatung Peters&Helbig, Essener Marketing GmbH and others.