Vanessa Schäfer
MBA 2026 Student
Boost your career next to your full-time job.
It’s time for the next step in your career? Join the KLU community of responsible and effective leaders as one of our next part-time MBAs in Leadership and Supply Chain Management. This hands-on, practice-oriented program is designed to equip you with the interdisciplinary skills needed to thrive in today’s business world. With a focus on team-based and case-based learning, it will help you hone your leadership skills and navigate complex supply chain challenges.
What makes this MBA program truly unique is KLU’s management philosophy: “Leading with an Operations Mindset.” This philosophy emphasizes a systematic, data-driven approach to optimizing processes, grounded in KLU’s logistics expertise and promoting sustainable and responsible leadership across all areas of business.
Experience the unique benefits of studying at Kühne Logistics University, where you’ll learn in an interactive environment, engage in immersive experiences using Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, and gain international exposure. With strong ties to the business world, we prepare you to take on a leadership role within your organization – without interrupting your full-time career!
As part of the MBA program, you’ll gain practical knowledge and skills that empower you to:
Plus, as a KLU alumnus, you’ll always be part of a thriving community, offering you opportunities for exchange and lifelong learning.
Germany’s universities are internationally renowned for their academic quality and degrees from them are highly valued by employers. In addition to world-class education, Germany provides a secure and welcoming environment, supported by a robust economy and a stable job market.
Hamburg stands out as one of the world’s most diverse and best cities to live in, offering a perfect balance between work and life, a rich cultural landscape, and a thriving international community. It’s an ideal location to kickstart your global career while enjoying all the city has to offer.
This program is designed for individuals who are already eligible to reside and study within the EU. Unfortunately, we cannot provide student visa support for this specific program.
However, participants who wish to visit our campus once a month by entering Germany visa-free as tourists (see here) can contact us at study@klu.org to look for possible arrangements.
Please download the following documents that are necessary for your application process as soon as you apply via our online application platform:
Confirmation of work experience
Employer's statement
Reference Form A*
Reference Form B*
Reference Form C*
Please note: Your application will be considered, once you submit your final application and documents via the application platform.
Our Admissions Department will then get in touch with you to support you through the rest of the application process.
*Two Reference Forms have to be filled out by an individual who has direct knowledge of your work experience (e.g. your supervisor, (senior) colleague). The third Reference Form has to be filled out by an individual who has direct knowledge of your personal motivation (e.g. a close friend, a former fellow student, a professor from university).
The eighteen-month part-time program combines classroom learning and team projects, including two international trips for cross-cultural insights. The curriculum spans broad strategic perspectives to detailed tactical issues in operational management, covering key business administration areas. The courses delivered align with KLU’s key competence areas: Digital Transformation, Sustainability and Entrepreneurship & Value Creation.
The program is composed of nine modules, including the capstone project:
Understanding the macroeconomic framework is one of the key factors for firm success. Opening with core knowledge about macroeconomic variables each manager should know, this module will then concentrate on the international elements of macroeconomics. For instance, the role of our national saving for trade deficits or surpluses is discussed as well as international capital flows and multinational enterprises. We will close this course with an expert analysis of foreign exchange markets and the strategies how to hedge again currency fluctuations.
In many real-world setups, your success will not only depend on your own decision making, but also on the decisions of other ‘players’. Players may be competing firms, bidders in an auction, politicians, nations, or sportsmen. Game Theory is about understanding and analyzing problems where opponents with non-aligned interests are relevant for your success. This modern field of science does not close with the analysis of a specific problem, but also provides valuable tools for selecting strategies which are good for your outcome of a game you play.
Program Highlight
Decisions related to personnel, organization divestitures, mergers, acquisitions, new markets, etc. may entail difficult human relations issues on various levels and for various reasons. In this course you learn how to properly identify difficult human relations issues and how to deal with them constructively. Additionally, we will focus on one aspect that has great potential but also just as much risk for conflict: Diversity. We will cover the advantages and disadvantages of diversity at work, including the conditions that can render diversity a competitive advantage. Specifically, we will cover how to first build diverse workforces (spanning from demographic diversity to diversity in thoughts) and secondly how to create a culture of inclusion.
Program highlight, interactive, reflective
The interplay of organizations competing in a market for customer attention leads to competition and constraints. The competition requires an understanding of the interactions of entities and the development of strategies to counter, block, or oppose the movements of competitors so that an organization can achieve its goals. You will be provided with the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to develop and critically reflect on strategies that allow your organization to compete globally.
Hot Topic
In the beginning you will recapture the fundamentals of accounting such as the accounting equation. Based on this, you will learn to better understand the language of business, which is accounting. Specifically, you will be enabled to better read and interpret financial statements such as the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement. You will further get to know the most important international financial accounting standards that govern the decision-making processes of international companies.
Program Highlight
You will be introduced to the wider domain of distributive (win/lose) and integrative (win/win) negotiations. Topics, among others, will include issues such as employing softball and hardball tactics, subtle psychological strategies, and counterstrategies, and crafting one's communication more deliberately including the particularities of negotiations in the online space. The win/win section draw the fine line between integrative negotiators and compromising negotiators. It will focus on how to build rapport but also concrete communication techniques to tease out interests and inspire creativity.
Highly interactive
Proper organization structure is necessary if a global strategy is to be effectively implemented and sustainable value created for stakeholders. This module provides you with the tools and frameworks needed to properly turn their strategies into appropriate organizational structures that not only can implement the strategy but can create long-term, sustainable value for all stakeholders.
Highly interactive
The overall aim is that you will be enabled to make better business decisions based on information that stems from the planning and controlling of financial performance. Specifically, you will be equipped with a toolbox of concepts such as relevant costs, break-even analysis, net present value calculations, budgeting, and performance measurement systems. Creating sustainable value will entail that you will not only focus on financial metrics, but also understand the necessity, but also the challenges when integrating non-financial metrics into the performance measurement systems of companies.
Program highlight
Against macro trends such as digitalization and current disruptions, organizations and individuals within organizations are challenged to build up new capabilities. Life-long learning is not only an impediment for individuals, but organizations need to continuously monitor and adjust their capabilities to stay competitive. For doing so, organizations need to move beyond formal learning by implementing informal learning formats and making continuous learning a habit throughout the organization.
You will learn why developing organizations and their employees that continuously learn from their environments is critical for organizational success in today’s complex and ever-changing world.
Hot topic
Long-term value creation only occurs if an organization can consistently develop new and valuable products for its customers and society. Unfortunately, developing new products is a challenging endeavor fraught with many uncertainties and complexities.
Firstly, we will address how organizations develop innovative ideas and how they bring those ideas to the market. The course will first focus on how to develop innovative products that are more sustainable through improved circularity.
Hot topic
You will learn in this course about what customers truly need, and how you can develop strategies and innovative ideas to fulfill those needs and do so in a manner that is both sustainable from an ongoing process perspective and from an environmental perspective. Organizations must properly market their newly developed products and services so that target customers are aware of their benefits. So, you will learn to structure your marketing mix, develop sales strategies appropriate for your products and customers, actively manage your customer relationships over time and develop awareness and branding.
Highly interactive
The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated the importance of personal resilience and physical as well as mental well-being in organizations. Therefore, you will also learn that not only do you need to understand how to stay resilient and healthy, but also how you can support your subordinates’ resilience and health. Additionally, we will learn relaxation techniques and how healthy work environments and work designs can be fostered in organizations.
Hot topic
In this course you will be introduced to the role of hardware and software in an organization and explore the foundations of data science and machine learning. You will be exposed to decision making using data science and analytics and we will discuss where to use data science and how to develop a strategy for your organization. Lastly a discussion on the challenges and opportunities as well as the recent field developments will take place.
Large international organizations today are quite different from the businesses that operated as recently as 50 years ago. No longer do businesses manage tightly coupled, vertically integrated, operations that provide the raw materials and subassemblies necessary for the finished products or services that the organization sells. Today’s international organization outsources to numerous suppliers and subsidiary organizations the production of the raw materials and subcomponents that the organization assembles into final products and services.
Managing highly dispersed and complex web of production and distribution requires sophisticated information systems. These technologies and systems are evolving rapidly, consequently, you will be introduced to the latest technologies and systems that are being employed to manage supply chain operations today so that the designs they develop can be managed efficiently and effectively.
Fact based decision making requires good analytical skills. This course will prepare you for conducting research for the capstone thesis project as well as for analyzing business problems after graduation. The course comprises both aspects of data collection (with a focus on survey methods) as well as data analysis (with a focus on approaches to make use of “big data”).
Support for your master thesis
Today’s volatile world, coupled with the impacts of global warming, has created ever-increasing demand for humanitarian response and aid. You will be introduced to the complex nature of supply chain operations in responding to humanitarian crises, how to manage supplier relationships effectively, and how to manage across organizational functions to achieve objectives that require collaboration. In addition, you will learn that the complexities and risks faced in operating in humanitarian crises are like those that an organization faces when having to respond to supply chain disruptions. The tools and techniques to operate in a resilient manner in one domain are demonstrated to be applicable to all domains through examples and discussions.
Hot topic, simulation game
Purchasing and supplier management (PSM) is on the agenda of management today. Top purchasing managers have moved up to CEO positions in companies such as Apple or Volkswagen. This course includes a study of foundational and advanced approaches used in the PSM process within modern companies. You will learn how to design and implement purchasing strategies, processes, structures, and systems, and how to structure and manage supplier portfolios and buyer-supplier relationships to meet firms’ supply needs. In practice, there is an increasing emphasis on outside-in innovation from the upstream supply chain. Therefore, it will be presented how startups or entrepreneurial ventures become suppliers to established firms, respectively how established buying firms can tap the benefits offered by startup suppliers.
High-performing supply chains require extensive collaboration and coordination of various stakeholders within an organization (i.e., sales, purchasing, operations, and the executive level) as well as from the outside of the organization, i.e., to suppliers and customers. All business processes and activities should be set up in a way to achieve a well-defined overall mission and/or vision of the organization. In practice, such collaboration and coordination are very often rather complex and difficult to achieve. You will gain a comprehensive understanding of how decentral organized supply chains interact within and across organizations, and how silo-based decision-making affects the overall business performance.
Simulation game, highly interactive
Study Trip - Universidad de los Andes Bogotá, Colombia and leadership reflection
You will experience insights into how supply chains, logistics operations, leadership, and business, in general, are conducted in Bogotá, Colombia. During this visit, you will be required to compare the country’s approach to business, leadership, and supply chain operations with your own knowledge of how these areas are operated in your home countries.
Program highlight, interactive, reflective
Includes a Practical Day from outstanding industry experts on relevant logistics and management topics, as well as the international study trip to the Universidad de los Andes School of Management in Bogotá, Colombia.
General managers who delegate their oversight of operations to “technical experts” risk doing major damage to their companies. Understanding operations means understanding processes. Not only do these processes produce the goods and services sold, but they also exist to operate the company. Every corner of the company is affected by processes. This course will first examine some of the key elements of processes, be they in either the manufacturing or the service realm or behind the scenes in company internal operations. We will then study what it takes for processes to become productive, in any kind of context.
The day-to-day operation of the logistics and supply chain functions in a modern international company requires a sophisticated understanding of not only the underlying execution processes of the operations but of the impact of these operations on the environment.
This course will provide you with the skills to lead, implement and operate lean and efficient logistics operations. To help you lead the change efforts required to enable their organization’s operations to sustainably provide value to customers and society, the course will introduce you to processes, frameworks, and tools that motivate individuals to change and that enable you to effectively lead these efforts.
Virtual reality
In a VUCA world, change is inevitable. However, strategic change initiatives that may look good on paper, often prove to be a Herculean task in practice. In this course, we cover the principles of change management from a behavioral point of view. Additionally, participants will be introduced to the fundamentals of human motivation. In doing so, participants will start on their journey to understand what motivates them at work and why anyone should follow their leadership. These insights will then be used to strengthen motivational messages tailored to respective audiences.
Reflective, highly interactive
Study Trip - OSU Columbus, Ohio and leadership reflection
On the second international study trip, you will experience insights into how supply chains, logistics operations, leadership, and business, in general, are conducted in Columbus, Ohio, USA. During this visit, you will be required as well to compare the country’s approach to business, leadership, and supply chain operations with your own knowledge of how these areas are operated in your home countries.
Program highlight, interactive, reflective
Includes the international study trip to the Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University in Ohio, U.S.A.
The lecture aims to give insights on some key challenges in Transport Management. It will first deliver an overview on latest developments looking at sectoral/statistical reports and discussing new innovations and business models in the market. We will then dive into the traditional mode choice discussion using an interactive case study on intermodal transport. The next part then covers transport costs which are driven by Economies of Scale. A simulation will provide an understanding why collaboration and cost sharing is a challenging task in this context. Finally, we will discuss regulation, which traditionally is important in this sector, especially in times where sustainability becomes important for society. A case study on regulation in the (rail) network industry will make this tangible.
Simulation game
You will be introduced to the fundamentals of AI and robotic process automation. Firstly, with a discussion on how intelligent robotic automation is transforming work processes and businesses. We will then dive into identifying processes ripe for automation and estimate its business value. Finally, we will discuss what are the main stages of the typical enterprise automation journey.
Hot topic
While being exposed to the complexities of international operations and goods movements from a management perspective is important to understand the potential ethical issues that often arise when operating across borders and cultures. You will be introduced to frameworks, tools, and techniques to understand when they are facing an ethical dilemma and how they should, could, or must respond in the face of the dilemma. The course also integrates a reflection on your own leadership style, leadership skills such as storytelling and empathetic communication and you will be encouraged to prepare a development plan based on your core values.
Highly interactive, reflective
The MBA Thesis is the final paper that completes the program. It is designed to demonstrate that you can work independently on a topic from your subject area using academic methods within a set period. You will be free to select a topic related to the study program or to focus on a work-related project.
Take this exceptional opportunity to gain world-class insights through international study trips. These immersive experiences allow you to explore the intricacies of supply chains, logistics, leadership, and the broader business landscape firsthand. Through conferences, corporate visits, and leadership workshops, you’ll deepen your understanding of these critical fields.
You’ll embark on two 1-week study trips at prestigious partner institutions:
These trips are designed to enhance your global and intercultural business skills. You’ll engage with local businesses, exchange ideas with industry leaders, and reflect on your intercultural experiences. After the trips, a follow-up session in Hamburg provides time for deeper reflection, where you’ll keep a journal to connect theory with practice and solidify what you’ve learned.
These study trips are fully recognized as educational leave in Germany. We’ll provide you with all the relevant documentation to ensure proper recognition.
Explore all your opportunities on how to engage with KLU - we are happy to discuss and help you find what you or your organization needs.
Most KLU Leadership & SCM graduates are experienced professionals looking to take their careers to the next level.
Our alumni work across a wide range of functions related to logistics and supply chain management, consulting, business development and sales, automotive, computer software, the maritime and shipping industry, logistics and transportation.
Our alumni work across a wide range of functions in the following sectors:
A degree from KLU is a career accelerator. Our alumni work for top companies such as:
The 18-month part-time MBA program costs €33,000.
KLU offers a range of scholarships for MBA students to help make your studies more affordable.
To apply for a scholarship, please submit the scholarship application form, a letter of motivation, and proof of your eligibility.
Scholarship application deadline: July 31
Since we have rolling admissions, it’s best to apply as early as possible – scholarships may be awarded before the deadline if eligible candidates apply early.
Also explore:
Brain Capital offers an innovative tuition financing model that allows you to either partially or fully defer your tuition fees while studying at KLU. Instead of paying upfront, you’ll make income-based payments after graduation, with the total amount based on your earnings. The solidarity principle means that higher earners repay more, while those with lower incomes contribute less. Rest assured, there are caps on both annual and total payments (approximately double the tuition fee, adjusted for inflation).
Want to learn more? Check out our blog post: Brain Capital: The solidary financing that believes in your potential
Several loan schemes are available to cover living expenses, primarily for German and EU nationals. Students from other countries may be eligible if they have a German Abitur and permanent residence status in Germany.
Take the opportunity to get in touch with our students and find out first hand how the studies are like from their point of view by clicking on one of the profiles and writing a message to the student.
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