The Smart Services track is one of the tracks in the two-year Operations and Management Logistics master’s program. Both years are divided into semesters that run from September to January and from February to July; each semester is divided into quarters of eight weeks in which you take courses. Knowledge is tested throughout a quarter and/or in subsequent examination periods of two weeks. As with all TU/e programs, the necessary skills are imparted through a mix of interactive lectures, engaging assignments and group work covering topics related to state-of-the-art research by the university’s professors, all of which is delivered in English.
Structure overview
As a whole, the program is structured as follows:
Year 1
- Track core courses (35 ECTS)
- Specialization electives (10 ECTS)
- Free electives (15 ECTS)
Year 2
Q1 + Q2:
- Literature review (5 ECTS)
- International semester/internship and electives/electives (25 ECTS)
Q3 + Q4:
- Graduation project (30 ECTS)
In the first year, Smart Services students take seven core courses, some of which allow for a choice between multiple options. These courses focus on aspects such as research methods in operations management and logistics, artificial intelligence, work and organizational psychology for operations management, business analysis for IT systems, business process management, knowledge-intensive business processes, service logistics, and design for smart services. Alongside these track core courses with a limited amount of flexibility, students can choose 10 ECTS (usually two courses) from a list of courses that are closely related to Smart Services and 15 ECTS (usually three courses) of free electives. This elective space allows students to deepen and/or broaden their knowledge even further by offering full freedom to design their program according to their interests and ambitions.
The second year consists of 25 ECTS of additional free electives, which can be used by the student to go abroad for an international semester. The final 35 ECTS are used for a literature review and the graduation project. Students who do not choose an international semester may opt for an academic or industrial internship as part of the free electives.
Relevant courses
Examples of relevant courses for Smart Services include:
- 1BM20 Business Analysis for Information Technology Systems. This course involves defining needs and designing/describing IT solutions for business problems, ranging from novel commercial software products to large-scale business/enterprise information systems. In addition to learning methods for analyzing IT systems, students will work in groups to develop and verify the requirements of an IT system or a specific part of it.
- 1BM05 Business Process Management. The focus of this course is on the integrated management of business processes to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of those processes. The course teaches students the methods, techniques and tools to perform each phase of the business process management lifecycle, including identification, discovery, diagnosis, design, execution and control.
- 1BM140 Engineering knowledge-intensive business processes. The course focuses on modeling and analyzing knowledge-intensive processes (KIPs), which are business processes performed by knowledge workers who need to perform interconnected decision-making tasks. KIPs are data-driven, semi-structured business processes that require substantial flexibility to deal with uncertainty in their environment. The course shows how techniques from AI and business process management can be used in concert to model and analyze KIPs.
- 1CM120 Advanced Maintenance and Service Logistics. This course covers service logistics and maintenance concepts using quantitative models and insights from traditional and condition-based maintenance optimization. This includes elementary maintenance models based on renewal theory, condition-based maintenance models and (the optimization of) multi-item, multi-location networks.
- 1BM100 Design of Service Operations. In this challenge-based course, students apply the techniques they learned in other courses to analyze and redesign a service based on practical data about a business process. As a group, students perform stages of the business process management lifecycle in order to understand the process and improve and develop an automation system for the service.
You can also complement the Smart Services track with courses from other tracks or electives to boost your field of expertise and increase your employability. The program provides ample opportunity to select courses that are closely related to the focus of the track, courses aimed at broadening general knowledge, and courses with a more methodological focus. For example, all students have the opportunity to deepen their methodological knowledge on artificial intelligence/data science by selecting a package of AI courses alongside the compulsory course on artificial intelligence.
Graduation project
Master’s degrees at TU/e conclude with a graduation project, often conducted within an organization in the relevant domain. Given that Brainport boasts over 5000 high-tech and IT companies, the region provides a wide array of options for students to find a place that suits them. Together with their company supervisor and academic supervisors, students formulate a practical, scientific and relevant research question. This results in a master’s thesis based around three elements:
- Literature survey (5 ECTS)
- Project proposal (no separate ECTS; part of 3)
- Graduation project (30 ECTS)
The literature survey is evaluated on a ten-point scale. The project proposal is conducted as the first part of a thesis and is evaluated on a go/no-go basis. Ideas for projects could include:
- Designing circular business models using a specific digital technology, such as blockchain. The method could be developed during an internship in consultation with manufacturing companies that develop circularity initiatives.
- Improving online customer service by developing data analytics solutions to understand customer complaints and predict negative customer satisfaction before the customer service is finalized.
- Exploring how organizations can digitally transform their business by enhancing their value propositions through AI. Students could investigate the AI maturity requirements and specific AI implementations of a certain domain so that organizations can create value from AI and measure this properly.
These are just examples; students also have a high degree of freedom to choose a topic that appeals to them and matches their career vision.
Studying abroad
In an increasingly interconnected world, the opportunity to spend part of your program elsewhere can provide valuable experience for an international career in (technological) innovation, including smart services. A master’s degree in the Smart Services track of Operations Management and Logistics therefore offers the option to go abroad in the first two quartiles of the second year of the program.