Director of Learning and Teaching
Course Leader: MSc International Logistics

Location: Lord Ashcroft Building, Cambridge
Room: LAB 313

UK: 0845 196 2626
International: +44 (0)1245 493131 ext. 2626
Email: helen.benton@anglia.ac.uk

Helen has been teaching since 1999, since then she has advanced from being a sessional tutor to a full-time lecturer. Helen has been responsible for the design, delivery and evaluation of undergraduate, postgraduate and professional modules and has used both Blackboard and WebCT virtual learning environments to support the sessions and provide the students with resources to guide them through the course.

Helen's primary research interest is in Supply Chain Management, focusing on supply chain design; supply chain planning and control systems and supply chain learning. Her main research project focuses on a new approach to selecting the planning and control systems to support a supply chain. The framework approach Helen developed, moves away from the historical technology-push based solutions, towards systematic analysis and evaluation before the selection of the most suitable system for a particular supply chain.

Helen enjoys collaborating with a network of both industrial and academic partners and is currently working on a consultancy project with BASF and Aston Business School that focuses on maximising the learning from their benchmarking endeavours. Working with colleagues from the Universities of Strathclyde and Liverpool, they have been evaluating supply chain design methodologies, in order to develop a new one that pays due attention to e-business concepts and other supply chain developments. Helen has also worked with colleagues at Aston on using simulation to train neural networks, which is part of a project for Rockwell Automation. She has been involved in a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation with The Logistics Institute (University of Arkansas) that led to the development of the Integrated Metrics Framework.

Journal articles:

Tang, N., Benton, H., Love, D., Albores, P., Ball, P., MacBryde, J. Boughton, N. and Drake, P. (2004) 'Developing an enterprise simulator to support electronic supply chain management for B2B electronic business,' International Journal of Production Planning and Control, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp. 572-583.

Dheeraj Bansal, Helen M. Benton, Graham Elvis, and Barrie Jones (to appear) 'Design, Implementation, Verification, Validation and Applications of TuneLearn, a motion dynamics simulation model' International Journal of Machine Tools and Manufacture

Benton, Helen; Binder, Mario and Egel-Hess, Wolfgang (2007) 'Benchmarking operations to promote learning: an internal supply chain perspective', International Journal of Learning and Change, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 145-169. International Journal of Learning and Change (IJLC) - Journal webpage