Graybar develops educational program with customers in mind
By Susan Avery -- Purchasing, 4/10/2008 2:00:00 AM
Graybar is preparing its employees to work with customers through education and training programs.
One is a supply chain management certificate program, the St. Louis-based distributor of electrical and communication products and services developed with Rutgers University for its top managers. The 15-month program which it began offering three years ago is intense: It combines the latest in business theory with real-world work experience.
The idea for the program began with Kathy Mazzarella, senior vice president of human resources and strategic planning at Graybar. Mazzarella was working on her MBA a few years back when she noted the disconnect between what she was being taught in the classroom and what she does on the job every day.
As Graybar was developing the certificate program, she says, "We figured there has to be a university that would help us take the best parts of graduate school education and blend it with real-world applications in a cost-effective manner. We wanted graduates to come away from our program with real working skills."
It took her five years, but she found what she was looking for in Tim Perlick, an adjunct instructor with Rutgers University. Perlick, who's been involved in education and distribution for 25 years and has worked for Graybar, McMaster-Carr and Flextronics, is responsible for developing the curriculum and facilitates the coursework for the supply chain management certificate program.
The program is selective. A panel consisting of Mazzarella, Perlick and Robert Reynolds, Graybar chairman, president and CEO, chooses 20 employees for it. The employees, who must demonstrate leadership potential, are recommended by a district vice president. For the recent session, or cohort as the company calls it, there were more than 100 applicants.
Much of the learning occurs online, and participants are divided into four teams of five. They get together face-to-face three times throughout the program. They meet for orientation and strategy setting at the beginning and gather again at mid-term, when they hear from a guest speaker and are assigned a capstone project. Past speakers were executives from such Graybar supplier companies as GE and Panduit. Participants meet for a final time at the end of the session when they present their projects to Graybar's leadership team.
The first half of the program is mainly academic, and covers such traditional subjects as finance, accounting, sales and marketing, human resources, law, ethics, procurement and logistics. When participants study procurement and logistics, they read Facing theForces of Change: Lead the Way in the Supply Chain and Keeping Score: Measuring the Business Value of Logistics in the Supply Chain. More important, the program goes a step further and actually applies what participants are learning to what is really happening day to day at Graybar.
This means the company's leadership is intimately involved in what the students are learning and assists in developing the curriculum. Corporate officers mentor the teams and provide guidance as the teams develop their projects. At the end of the program, the officers select a winning project.
Because the program is designed so that the curriculum relates back to Graybar's business, much of the work the students do toward their projects is applied within the company. The team whose project won in the second cohort developed regression analysis for predictive sales modeling that's being used today.
"Graybar has four teams of its most talented employees focus on the company's own core strategic initiatives," says Perlick of the value of the program to the company. "The teams bring in new thought leadership from the academic side, marry that with in-house experience and provide the leadership with true insight into the operation."
And participants' learning doesn't end with graduation. Graduates act as mentors to teams in the current cohort and can continue to participate in the online learning portion of the program if they'd like.
Patrick Davis, director of electrical sales for Graybar in Boston, Mass., is a graduate of the program and a member of the team that worked on the predictive sales modeling project. He's still involved in the program as a mentor and says his experience has helped him to think more strategically, which helps when he deals with customers.
"The program makes Graybar a much more dynamic company and partner," Davis says. "Customers, whether a Fortune 500 company or a company around the corner, like to know their partner has management in place that understands the challenges of doing business and is capable of helping them solve their problems."
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