Education for the 21st Century Supply Chain Phoenix AZ

When Robert Spekman was writing his thesis as a graduate student of business in the mid-1970s, he says that the emphasis in the purchasing profession was very much on "three bids and a cloud of dust." At the time, purchasing executives were thought to have little to contribute at a strategic level within corporations, and the occupants of C-level suites and corner offices spent little time thinking about supply chain.

Now, of course, supply chain is at the top of the agenda for many, if not most, corporate leaders. "Corporate management is starting to understand that, with so much of their percentage of revenue being purchased, supply chains are very, very important," says Spekman, who now is the Tayloe Murphy professor of business at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business, in Charlottesville, Va.

Business schools around the United States are responding to this trend by ramping up their supply chain management programs to provide the next generation of corporate leaders with the skills they need to meet the challenges of the 21st century supply chain. That includes schools with longstanding programs in supply chain management — schools like Arizona State University, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State and Tennessee.

But it also includes schools like Darden, which addresses supply chain management in the context of its general business curriculum and in an executive education program targeted at working professionals. Spekman is actually a marketing professor whose primary focus is on B2B marketing. However, he has written over a dozen academic papers on the supply chain including a book called The Extended Enterprise: Gaining Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Supply Chains, which he co-wrote with a fellow Darden professor, Edward W. Davis. A number of his supply chain papers have been cited for their contribution to managerial thought.

In his courses at the business school, Spekman emphasizes the importance of upstream relationship-building back into the supply base. He says that in this "supply chain versus supply chain" world, it is particularly important for supply chain management executives to be able to build bridges with suppliers. "Cost reduction is part of the process, but you ought to be looking for revenue-enhancing opportunities as well," he says. "You should be partnering with people who not only can afford you more efficient operations but who also are more effective in what they do. You need to be able to leverage their skills to be more effective as a supply chain in meeting the needs of the customers."

Spekman believes that it is critical for future captains of business to be exposed to the supply chain early on. "It's very important for general management — and particularly for young, emerging leaders — to understand that what goes on in the supply chain can be very important to the bottom line," he says. By the same token, he works to educate supply chain students and participants in the executive education program at Darden about how to "market" the value of supply chain to other functional leaders and top executives within their own enterprises.

Skills for the Global Supply Chain

Undergraduate business students at Northeastern University in Boston also get exposure to supply chain concepts in a required SCM course. In addition, the school offers a supply chain management track in its MBA program and a graduate certificate program in SCM that is open to applicants from industry as well as MBA students. The school's supply chain executive alumni include leading logistics executives at organizations like Dollar Tree Stores and Staples.

Robert C. Lieb, professor of supply chain management at Northeastern, says that the school's SCM curriculum emphasizes specific knowledge around the types of problems that supply chain managers face on a day-to-day basis and the decision-making process for addressing those problems. On a strategic level, undergrad and graduate students are exposed to different approaches to using supply chain as a differentiating factor and as a key element of corporate strategy. As at Darden, Northeastern's supply chain curriculum emphasizes interpersonal skills, because, as Lieb says, "it might be a capital-intensive business, but it's a 'people-intensive' business as well."

Lieb notes that the supply chain program at Northeastern has seen an increasing number of students coming from overseas, and he estimates that currently foreign students account for about 40 percent of the graduate-level business class. He says that the program has always had a large contingent of students from Europe, but the school is seeing a growing number of SCM students coming from Asia, including both China and India, and from South America and Central America. With reports that China has a shortfall of half-a-million logistics managers and similar shortages of qualified staff elsewhere in the world, the program offers a valuable training ground for supply chain leaders in developing economies. But it makes for good exposure for America's future supply chain leaders, too, since they inevitably will be working with — if not for — foreign suppliers once they enter industry. "You might be having a conversation in the classroom about offshore manufacturing, and there will be a student sitting in the room whose father owns a factory in China," Lieb says.

Taking the Classroom Online

The increasing role of technology in enabling the supply chain also is being reflected in the evolving offerings of SCM degree programs. Take Penn State University, for example. The Smeal College of Business at Penn State in University Park, Pa., has had a highly regarded logistics program dating back to the 1960s, and in 2002 the department came together with the Management Science and Information Systems Department to form the Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems. The program currently is one of the largest in the country in terms of teaching contingent, with 27 full-time faculty, and in terms of students, with 600 undergraduate majors in supply chain management. Smeal offers two Masters-level programs, including a recently added online Masters program.

For the online courses, John E. Stevens, director of the Master of Professional Studies in Supply Chain Management Program, says that the college employs an instructional designer dedicated to working with the school's faculty to combine the best features of in-class instruction with the best technologies available for Web-based delivery. The online courses, which are accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, begin and end on a schedule but allow students to access instruction asynchronously when it's convenient for them. "It meets the market need," Stevens says, "because we're looking at working professionals who can participate in the program irrespective of time zone."

William L. (Skip) Grenoble, executive director and senior research associate at the Center for Supply Chain Research at Smeal, adds that the school has woven instruction on the application of technology into its supply chain courses. He cites, as an example, one of the open-enrollment executive education courses, a three-and-a-half day program, cosponsored by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, called Processes and Tools for Supply Chain Success. "This program covers the various technologies used across plan, source, make, deliver and return, providing a review and first exposure to many of these tools," Grenoble explains.

Increasing Interest in SCM

Gene Tyworth, chair of the Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems at Smeal, sees overall interest in supply chain management education increasing. "Globalization, information technology, the [supply chain's] financial impact, sustainability, linking processes end-to-end, risk and resilience — all those things are leading a lot of companies to think about supply chain transformation," Tyworth says.

Robert Lieb, who helped establish the supply chain programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Northeastern in 1970 and 1995, respectively, agrees that the interest level in SCM among students has increased steadily in recent years. "When we put together the program at the graduate level, a lot of the faculty thought that if we attracted 10 percent of the MBA students into the supply chain track that would be something. But in the first year we got about 20 percent of the students in supply chain, and with this year's MBA class, supply chain is going to be well north of 25 percent of the students," the professor says.

Lieb attributes this continued interest to two factors: (a) more supply chain jobs than available qualified applicants, which (b) has driven up salaries for SCM grads. "MBAs track the job market and are very aware of the growth areas," Lieb says, "and they will pursue the training they need to meet the needs of the market."