U.S., but it is a key source of innovation.”
The Supply Chain Center of Excellence
at the McCombs School of Business in
Austin is only a couple of years old. It grew
out of an earlier effort by a group of business interests to convince McCombs to add
a supply chain course of study to its highly
regarded graduate and undergraduate business program. These companies were looking for graduates more grounded in
business than in engineering.
As that moved forward, these companies
continued to work with the business school
around developing a center were they could
work on common supply chain issues, influence future research and develop best practices—the COE was the result.
“At the end of the day, our mission is to
support and promote research in supply
chain management and related fields,” says
Lamar Johnson, senior associate director of
the center. “But to fund research, we need a
partnership with industry.”
McCombs has put together a program that
offers a number of benefits to its corporate
sponsors. “What these companies want first
and foremost are graduates who are edu-
cated in business and who are prepared to
move into the supply chain field and begin
contributing immediately,” he says. “They
also are interested in short-term or longer
term research that can help them solve problems, while exposing them to students and
furthering the education of students.”
McCombs is open to research projects
suggested by faculty and students that grab
the interest of a corporate sponsor, or projects that are suggested by a business partner. Often such research ideas are sparked
by an event that the COE conducts.
“Last fall we held an event around sales
and operations planning, since that is a
process that companies seemed to be struggling with,” says Johnson. “We spent a full
day on the S&OP process and at the end we
asked the group what questions remained
that might be addressed by academic
research. They listed four or five issues and
we eventually funded one research project,
which is under way today. We have now
had three events and each has resulted in
funded research,” says Johnson.
The center currently is seeking funding
for a project, suggested by a faculty mem-
ber, to investigate what makes for a successful deployment of an analytical tool
and how companies can improve their
ROI on such deployments. “We have one
company that is very interested in this
project and other companies in our sponsoring group have indicated they would
provide benchmarking information,”
Johnson says. “If we move forward, the
sponsoring company will get first access
to the output of the research, then the
benchmark participants and finally the
faculty member will publish it so it will be
available to everyone.”
To access this article online, visit The Digital
Edition at www.SupplyChainBrain.com.
P&G,
www.pg.com
Dow Chemical,
www.dow.com
IBM,
www.ibm.com
Censeo Consulting Group,
www.censeoconsulting.com
MIT CTL,
http://ctl.mit.edu
McCombs COE,
www.mccombs.utexas.edu/scm
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