More pencils, books forecast in supply chain
Academic and corporate supply chain organizations partner to prepare the managers of tomorrow
By Maria Varmazis -- Purchasing, 9/1/2005 2:00:00 AM
For a comprehensive list of universities offering Supply Chain Management degrees, scroll to the bottom of this article.
Just as the supply chain function is increasing its importance and visibility in corporate organizations, so too are supply chain courses and programs gaining popularity within the academic world. Whereas a decade ago schools might have added one or two relevant supply chain classes to their overall business or engineering curricula, now universities are creating entire schools or departments dedicated to educating a new generation of supply chain managers. In the United States alone, over 60 schools now offer supply chain management degrees.
The impetus for many of these new programs is coming from industry itself. "Companies are starting to realize that how they manage their supply chain will affect how they compete," says Alan Raedels, professor of supply and logistics management at Portland State University in Oregon. "As one professional once said, it's no longer my company against your company, it's my supply chain vs. your supply chain."
Corporate leaders are working with professors to help them ensure that academic programs address the real-world issues graduates will face when they join the work force. Among the strategies to keep curricula grounded in business: First, professors and students conduct research or case studies in conjunction with corporations, receiving feedback from their peers and taking results directly to the classroom. Second, alumni provide a crucial link to the business world by telling their alma mater what industry trends they've seen in the field and making specific suggestions to faculty for improving their program. And, third—perhaps most important—schools maintain active and involved partnerships with corporations through advisory boards, industry organizations, and student-conducted industrial research. By doing this, schools stay current on industry trends.
Research initiatives
While most schools with supply chain management programs strongly en-courage, if not require, their students to participate in at least one internship, many schools manage their students' field research through formal organizations that pull companies and students together. One such example is North Carolina State University's Supply Chain Research Consortium (SCRC), which Cecil Bozarth, associate professor of supply chain management at NCSU calls "our main conduit to the industry." Through the SCRC, teams of students work directly with companies on practicum projects to find solutions to real-world business problems. For example, one group of students is working with off-road equipment maker Caterpillar to implement lean strategy. Another recent student-led project in fall 2004 led to the creation of collaborative-planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) training material for planners at GlaxoSmithKline.
Student research projects are then uploaded to the SCRC website for interested companies to view, which assists students in getting hired, often by the company they worked with on their practicum project. "If you're a company looking to hire some students and you've had a team of MBAs working with you for a semester, you get a pretty good idea of who can do what and whether there's an interest there," says Bozarth.
In another case, Massachusetts-based athletic footwear maker Reebok went to two students and a professor at MIT's Masters of Logistics (MLOG) program to get help with its forecast capabilities. The MLOG team analyzed the problem and helped the company build more flexibility into its supply chain by using a newsvendor approach, a model that takes the methods of newspaper vendors who must calculate daily how many papers to buy to meet market demand without exceeding it.
Another example of the symbiosis between businesses and schools is the Howard University student-run supply chain management (SCM) organization. This organization sponsors case study competitions yearly, which for Colin Thompson, a third year MBA candidate, has proven to be a valuable experience. Thanks to the business case competition, says Thompson, "we are able to discuss industry concepts and trends and receive feedback and mentorship from industry professionals."
A student in the part-time MBA program, Thompson works full-time as an IT project manager and says his experiences in the business case competition as well as in the classroom translate directly to his current job. IT work requires "providing customers with high quality, customized products or services based on particular customer preferences in the quickest time possible," he says. "As I studied the technologies that provided these capabilities, I soon learned that in addition to IT, managing the process of producing the product from the raw materials stage through the post-sales support stage was just as important." He believes the combination of classroom work and his full-time job "has allowed me to not only learn, but also apply these techniques in a real world environment, which has led to increased customer satisfaction."
Alumni representation
At the Center for Logistics Management at the University of Nevada Reno, director and professor Dale Rogers says it's an unwritten rule that his former graduate assistants must come in to speak with current students. Several alumni of his program (including those who have gone on to become operational managers at Ford or head of supply chain practice at Hitachi Consulting for example) have returned to Rogers' classroom to present guest lectures to current students and faculty. These lectures grab the attention of students, often more effectively than professors' lectures, Rogers admits, because they give a current and candid portrait of the supply chain field, and they can tell students what industry initiatives to watch.
Strong alumni representation also has benefits for companies seeking to bring in new hires. Lee Buddress, associate professor of supply and logistics management at Portland State University, says that 50% of companies that participate in supply chain management recruiting events on campus are represented by PSU alumni. During these recruitment events, students hear directly from alumni about how they went from being a student, to attaining a high-level managerial position.
"I could talk about the topics until the cows come home and the students may or may not pay attention," Buddress says. "But when one of our former students comes back and says 'hey listen up, you better pay attention, this is important because you're going to need this soon,' then all of a sudden everybody pays attention."
Corporate partnerships
Most schools with a supply chain management program, at any level, have established an advisory board of corporate representatives that work with the school year-round to ensure the curriculum includes current topics and challenges. Janet Hartley, chair of the Bowling Green State University department of management, says her school founded its Supply Chain Management Institute in 2000. It gathers input from 14 companies.
"We meet with representatives of these companies twice each year and their input was instrumental in the design of our revised supply chain management program," says Hartley.
In their meetings with industry professionals, faculty also learns what skills corporations want to see from students when they enter the workforce.
"One challenge is identifying what skills students will need in their job," says David Fitzpatrick, chair of Howard University's supply chain management graduate program. He says the Howard program asks corporations what specific skills a new-hire will need to make contributions to the company in their first year or two.
Joseph Carter, chair of the supply chain management department at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, says the corporate board he works with suggested his department put more stress on analytical skills, and based on that suggestion he added classes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels that model supply chain problems and find solutions analytically. Most faculty interviewed say that at least one course had been recently added to their school's curriculum based on corporate input. Among them: courses that address sustainability, forecasting, quality control, offshoring/outsourcing, knowledge management, ethics, negotiation, and e-commerce.
Regular communication between schools and companies sometimes leads to changes in teaching methods and materials in addition to new curriculum suggestions. Elmhurst College's Center for Business and Economics used a $1 million grant from logistics technology firm Logility to incorporate its software to plan, coordinate and optimize model supply chains. And students at ASU use a software package from IBM to model and experiment on their own hypothetical supply chains.
Several schools also offer new types of degrees based on corporate suggestions—most notably adding executive and part-time programs to their schools to supplement the education of managers already working in supply chain management. Darren Prokop, director of the Masters program in global supply chain management at the University of Alaska Anchorage, says that the school's entire logistics and supply chain management program was created after Anchorage's mayor pushed for such a program and got local corporations to donate more than $1 million towards the cause in 1999. One year later, because of encouragement from its corporate sponsors, which include FedEx, UPS and the Municipality of Anchorage, UAA added a masters program to its logistics department.
What faculty emphasizes is, while the school itself makes the final decision in what changes are made to curricula, it is crucial that businesses become partners with colleges and universities in order to graduate students who are as competent and knowledgeable as possible.
"[Businesses today] really do need educated employees that can figure stuff out, and so we're sort of in the business of putting those folks out," says Rogers. "We really need businesspeople to be involved in what we do. It's not just a good thing for them; it's a good thing for the industry as a whole."
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Where SC is the place to be
Golden Gate University Ageno School of Business
http://www.ggu.edu
BBA, MBA, DBA, graduate certificate in operations and supply chain management
Elmhurst College Center for Business and Economics
http://cbe.elmhurst.edu
MS supply chain management
North Carolina State University College of Management
http://mba.ncsu.edu
BS and MBA concentration supply chain management
Syracuse University Martin J. Whitman School of Management
http://www.whitman.syr.edu/supplychain
BS, MBA, PhD, executive supply chain management
Portland State University School of Business Administration
http://www.sba.pdx.edu
BS supply and logistics management
Bowling Green State University
http://www.cba.bgsu.edu/cba
BS, BA purchasing and supply chain management specialization
University of Wisconsin-Madison Grainger Center for Supply Chain Management
http://www.bus.wisc.edu/grainger
Undergraduate specialization, MBA/MS supply chain management
University of Nevada Reno Center for Logistics Management
http://www.unr.edu/coba/logis
BBA, MBA supply chain management
Howard University School of Business
http://www.bschool.howard.edu/scm
MBA supply chain management
Saint Joseph’s University
http://www.sju.edu
BS, certificate in purchasing/supply chain management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center of Transportation and Logistics
http://web.mit.edu/mlog
ME Logistics (MLOG)
Central Michigan University Center for Supply Chain Management
http://www.cscn.cmich.edu
BSBA operations, purchasing and supply, or logistics management
University of Alaska Anchorage College of Business and Public Policy
http://logistics.alaska.edu
BBA logistics management, MS global supply chain management
Eastern Michigan University Department of Marketing
http://www.scm.emich.edu
MBA, MBA specialization, graduate certificate in supply chain management
Arizona State University W.P. Carey School of Business
http://wpcarey.asu.edu/scm
BS, MBA, PhD, executive supply chain management
Rutgers University Center for Supply Chain Management
http://business.rutgers.edu
MBA, PhD supply chain management
Northeastern University, the College of Business Administration
http://www.mba.neu.edu
Graduate certificate supply chain management
Looking for a scholarship in supply chain?
The Institute of Supply Management has a comprehensive list of scholarships available to supply chain management programs on its web site: http://www.ism.ws/ISMMembership/AffiliateScholarships.cfm
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