Laszlo Torjai

Background

Prior to joining Cranfield School of Management, Laszlo worked in both academia and industry. He started his carrier at the University of Pecs (Hungary) participating in then leading research projects in the area of supply chains in sustainable energy systems. His teaching experience covers operations and supply chain management as well as various analytical subjects such as operations research and business statistics.

As a consultant, running his own business, he undertook analytical and applied research projects on greatly different business problems from supply chain network design to data quality improvement to employee performance evaluation. Later, he worked as a senior business intelligence analyst for multinational clients.

Qualifications

• PhD in Business Administration - thesis: "Optimal Transportation Scheduling in Herbaceous Biomass Supply Chains"
• MSc in Business Administration, specialisation in Management and Consulting

Current activities

Laszlo, in close collaboration with the Infrastructure and Project Authority (Cabinet Office), is conducting a data-driven/analytical research on UK government major projects aiming to improve

• Project Delivery, which concentrates on the traditional performance measures such as the iron triangle (cost, time quality), and
• Programme Value Creation, which focuses on the long-term benefits realisation and the value created to and captured by various stakeholders.

One of our major research questions is "What impact does assurance system have on project/programme performance and how to improve its effectiveness?"

In the frame of this work, Laszlo is actively taking part in managing the collaboration among academics addressing research questions on project governance and reporting, assurance of major projects, as well as their impacts on decision making and project performance.

In the meanwhile, he is assisting research projects using advanced analytical and modelling techniques mainly in the field of Supply Chain Management and Logistics.

Clients

Featured clients of applied research and (BI) analytics projects

• Infrastructure and Project Authority, Cabinet Office (UK)
• Peterborough City Council
• EY
• Procter & Gamble
• General Mills
• Hungarian Post Ltd.
• Hungarian Energy Office
• Pannon Thermal Power Plant (Dalkia Group)

Publications

• Articles in journals
• Conference papers

Articles In Journals

• Torjai L, Nagy J & Bai A (2015) Decision hierarchy, competitive priorities and indicators in large-scale ''herbaceous biomass to energy'' supply chains, Biomass and Bioenergy, 80 321-329.
• Torjai L & Kruzslicz F (2015) Mixed integer programming formulations for the Biomass Truck Scheduling problem, Central European Journal of Operations Research, 24 (Online) 1-15.
• Szendroi E & Torjai L (2008) Decision support application for design and management of energy-grass supply chain, Pollack Periodica, 3 (1) 41-52.

Conference Papers

• Torjai L & Nagy J (2017) Performance measurement system for herbaceous biomass supply chains. In: IPSERA 2017 Conference, Budapest - Balatonfured, 9 April 2017.
• Varga L, Torjai L, Allen P & Reefke H (2016) Sustainable urban transport: complex systems evaluation. In: The 2016 Conference on Complex Systems, Amsterdam, 19 September 2016.
• Torjai L & Bourne M Assurance as a tool for successful project management in major projects. In: PMA Performance Management Association 2016 conference, Edinburgh, 27 June 2016.