Await Clarkson Supply Chain Graduates

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1 Vol 8. Issue 2 Clarkson s Global Supply Chain Management Program has been ranked as a top 20 program in the nation by U.S. News & World Report for 12 consecutive years. Great Job Prospects Await Clarkson Supply Chain Graduates Our global supply chain management (GSCM) program is among the nation s best because we combine recognized leading-edge scholarship with an innovative curriculum focused on real-world needs. We help discover and disseminate stateof-the-art practices and insights. As a result, we develop outstanding managers who consistently deliver immediate value to supply chains around the globe. We enjoy unique strengths in cross-disciplinary collaboration thanks to our small size, enhancing our competitive advantage. Perhaps the strongest endorsement of our supply chain management program is how eagerly leading companies pursue our graduates. For example, during our last Career Fair there were 48 companies, including Alcoa, Amazon, Caterpillar, Corning Incorporated, DuPont, Eaton, GE, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Raymond/Toyota Industrial Equipment, Target and United Technologies, seeking to hire our supply chain management students. No wonder our placement rate is among the highest in the nation at 98%. The effectiveness of our approach is also reflected in the popularity and success of our annual Executive Seminar, enabling professionals already working in the supply chain management field to be introduced to the state-of-the-art techniques, tactics and strategies. More than 500 professionals from nearly 75 corporations, including about 30 Fortune 500 companies, have attended from across the U.S. and abroad. This issue will demonstrate our ongoing efforts and commitment to the field. From hiring new faculty, Usman Ahmed, who explores how firms can design and leverage supply chain relationships to improve competitiveness (p. 2-3), to Gilberto Márquez-Illescas, who utilizes data regarding costs, inventories and sales to improve process efficiency (p. 4). We also illustrate our collaboration with corporate partners to bring real-world challenges to the classroom (p. 6). This issue exhibits the growing reputation of our faculty as they attain positions of leadership in international professional associations, serve as invited speakers before industry leaders and are awarded grants to continue developing innovative curricula (p. 5, 8). Finally, the engagement of successful industry leaders with our students reinforces the key principles and strategies that they are learning in their courses (p. 7). Professor Farzad Mahmoodi Joel Goldschein 57 Endowed Chair in Global Supply Chain Management and director of Clarkson s GSCM Program We hope you enjoy this edition of Linkages and welcome your feedback ([email protected]).

2 P a g e 2 Designing Supply Chain Relationships for Increased Competitiveness P a g e 3 My research explores how firms can design and leverage supply chain relationships for greater competitiveness. A supply chain relationship is more than the exchange of goods and services for money. Supply chain partners collaborate on a range of tasks from product development to planning inventories. Relationships are forged, many of them vital to day-to-day operations. Usman Ahmed says, Management s tasks vary with the nature and activities at the heart of each relationship. The Clarkson instructor has been conducting research on collaborative initiatives, their resulting professional relationships and how they re built. Right now, he says, we know little about these relationships beyond the utility of collaborations among manufacturers, suppliers and customers. The people now working on building or maintaining supply chains need a framework for tailoring collaborations among partners and choosing the right type of support and governance in these relationships. The need for this kind of strategic information, Ahmed says, is highlighted by the challenges and opportunities now at play in the global marketplace. For every dollar in sales, he says, firms pay an average of 48 cents to their suppliers. Apple was able to successfully combine the expertise of Samsung in making displays with its software and user-interface skills to build portable computing devices with the vivid retina display. On the other hand, Boeing tried to utilize the knowledge and expertise of its global supplier base to reduce the development time and cost of the 787 airplane, but ended up being three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. My research explores how firms can design and leverage supply chain relationships for greater competitiveness especially in dynamic business conditions. Ahmed s work also offers a look into the collaborative initiatives based on the last decade of supply chain research. He has identified the elements or building blocks of supply chain relationships and found a wide variety of combinations. The way these building blocks perform, he says, and their outcomes can be very different. Some offer no advantage but are required to forge other building blocks. Others can help generate efficiency but don t significantly impact an organization s ability to compete in the marketplace. And some are difficult to implement but can help firms increase their competitive advantage. He stresses that understanding the implications of these building blocks is crucial for managers who seek to further their objectives by building appropriate supply chains and relationships. Many industries are experiencing change due to rapid advances in technology and changing customer needs, he adds. As companies try to adapt, they need to reconfigure their most vital supply chain relationships. My research finds the elements used to build collaborative supply chain relationships react differently to dynamic business conditions. Some elements become less useful if the business conditions change at a rapid pace. Knowing this allows managers to match the nature and design of their supply chain relationship with the business conditions they face. This was brought into sharp focus during the financial crisis of The challenges imposed by an unexpected and deep recession are still fresh in the minds of most managers. Reviewing a decade of data, Ahmed analyzed which firms are better able to cope with recessions by considering their marketing and supply chain capabilities. He compared firms as they moved through periods of economic expansion and recession. After the economy began contracting, firms that invested in developing efficient operations outperformed those that focused on growth. Ignoring operations in good times, he says, means lacking resilience when economic conditions worsen. I concluded that during a recession, it becomes extremely difficult to develop new capabilities. Organizations cannot focus on operational efficiencies only after recession hits and expect to match other firms that invested in operations during periods of growth. Since joining Clarkson in August 2014, Ahmed has designed a new course called Logistics Management. This course begins with designing and evaluating logistics strategy to support business goals. It then explores tradeoffs between logistics costs and how to take a total-cost approach. Students use simulations and calculations to evaluate the number and location of logistics facilities. This gives our students the advantage of understanding the centrality of location decisions to logistics costs, he says. As much as 70 to 80% of total logistic costs become fixed once the locations of facilities and suppliers are determined. Knowing this effect on costs and the impact on supply chains gives Clarkson students a tremendous advantage in designing effective supply chains. This kind of specialized knowledge is also crucial to logistics strategy and optimizing an organization s supply chain. At Clarkson, Ahmed plans to continue research that helps managers solve problems and make informed decisions about their company and its supply chain relationships. His goal is to design a comprehensive framework for creating and managing supply chain relationships that account for different business conditions, expectations and capabilities of the supply chain partners involved. Such a framework will be of great value in managing the complex web of supply chain relationships that currently exists in many industries. Muhammad Usman Ahmed received his B.S. degree in computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, in He worked as a research engineer at California Institute of Technology and as a summer intern at Microsoft. After Ahmed earned his MBA in 2007, he worked for two years in the retail division of Alghanim Industries in Kuwait. While there, he finished his Green Belt and Black Belt Lean Six Sigma training. His work involved conducting Lean Six Sigma projects in all areas of the retail supply chain, including retail stores, distribution centers and supplier management. Ahmed started his Ph.D. at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada, in He is scheduled to defend his dissertation this year. His research has been published in the Journal of Operations Management and the International Journal of Production Economics. His research interests include supply chain management and sustainable operations. Usman Ahmed

3 Utilizing Information to improve P a g e 4 P a g e 5 Prof. Gilberto Márquez-Illescas TOP 30 Private Colleges with MILLION-DOLLAR RETURNS ON INVESTMENT, Affordable Colleges Online 2013 Supply Chain Efficiency B Business managers are involved in several activities: they purchase goods and services, strategize, make decisions and more. What if every purchase, policy or new pursuit could be measured for financial and operational advantages? In fact, these actions can be measured by accountants, like Assistant Professor Gilberto Márquez-Illescas. Before he joined the School of Business faculty at Clarkson, he received his doctorate at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, where he conducted research on various corporate processes to increase efficiency. Given my background in economics and finance, he says, I found I was able to do this using accounting. It s more than numbers and financial statements. Accounting can measure the efficacy of every move a company makes and these valuations can provide managers the information they need to make effective decisions. Prof. Márquez-Illescas focuses on the types of information used by decision makers to plan and control operations. He says when data regarding costs, inventories and sales move along a supply chain, processes are likely to become more efficient, which can result in competitive advantages in the marketplace. But there are problems, he says. Information flows are not as robust as they could be. This surprised me, because isn t it advantageous for all supply chain partners to share information? The answer to such questions drives his research. Specifically, I have been analyzing the effects of bargaining power on the supply chain members willingness to share information. It appears that more powerful members are more reluctant to share data. However, he has identified some factors that can lead to greater information sharing. I have found some evidence, he says, indicating that time pressure and the potential losses incurred by long negotiations can motivate more powerful supply chain members to share data. In other research, Prof. Márquez-Illescas is analyzing the relationship between bargaining power and how supply chain members split the potential advantages of information flows. When data regarding costs, inventories and sales move along a supply chain, processes are likely to become more efficient, which can result in competitive advantages in the marketplace. It is true, he says, that more powerful members obtain the lion s share of benefits resulting from data sharing. This leads me to another important question: What can less powerful supply chain members do to obtain more benefits from sharing their private information? To date, he has presented papers at the American Accounting Association Annual Meeting, European Accounting Association Annual Meeting and the European Manufacturing Accounting Research Conference, among others. Profs. Mahapatra and Mahmoodi Co-Chair Manufacturing and Operations Track at POMS Annual Conference M More than 1,000 researchers from some 50 countries gathered at the 25 th annual conference of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) in Atlanta, Georgia. They discussed a wide variety of topics across several tracks. Clarkson University s Santosh Mahapatra, Associate Professor of Operations and Information Systems and Prof. Farzad Mahmoodi, the Joel Goldschein 57 Endowed Chair in Global Supply Chain Management, served as co-chairs of Manufacturing Operations Track. The two professors oversaw several sessions, each dedicated to a specific theme such as manufacturing strategy, capacity planning, inventory management, production planning and scheduling, advanced manufacturing systems, lean manufacturing and six sigma, facility location and network design, contracts in manufacturing supply chain and strategic supplier management. There were a total of 60 paper presentations covering several relevant issues in Manufacturing Supply Chains. The range of issues covered a wide variety of topics including socially responsible operations and environmental sustainability. The papers demonstrated application of an array of methodological approaches Profs. Mahapatra and Mahmoodi that included case studies, surveys, action research, in addition to the more conventional analytical modeling, mathematical programming, simulation and computational algorithms. The ever-expanding methodological approaches indicate the need for more rigorous understanding of increasingly complex manufacturing and operational problems that are faced by organizations in recent years. Top Management Night Presentation at APICS Rochester Chapter Although cost savings, superior delivery performance and improved quality of goods and services are commonly viewed as a result of effective supply chain initiatives, the relationship between supply chain management competency and firms financial performance is not well established. As a result, supply chain professionals often struggle to articulate the impact of their initiatives on the firm s financial performance, and many senior executives do not fully appreciate the benefits of developing supply chain competency, according to Prof. Farzad Mahmoodi, Joel Goldschein 57 Endowed Chair in Global Supply Chain Management and director of Clarkson s Global Supply Chain Management Program. He discussed the importance of linking the impact of supply chain initiatives to firm s financial performance and demonstrating their impact on creating shareholder value at a special professional development meeting (referred to as Top Management Night ) of the APICS (Association for Operations Management) chapter in Rochester, N.Y. The audience consisted of mid- to senior-level managers and executives involved in sourcing, manufacturing, materials management, distribution, logistics and information systems. This presentation was based on the research Prof. Mahmoodi has been conducting in conjunction with Prof. Heimo Losbichler, Head of Accounting, Controlling and Financial Management at University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria.

4 P a g e 6 Clarkson is enthusiastic and engaged in codeveloping initiatives that develop effective employees with an ability to contribute at Goodyear immediately after joining our team. This partnership is part of Goodyear s strategy of developing top talent for our organization. Ray Robinson 12 Collaborating with Goodyear to Bring Real-World Challenges to Class C Ray Robinson 12 Case-based reasoning. It s how students gain the knowledge and experience to become practicing professionals. And it s a crucial part of the global supply chain management curriculum at Clarkson. To further these academic opportunities, a team of managers at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company is creating a unique case competition exclusively for Clarkson business students. Ray Robinson, Clarkson MBA 12 and a project leader at Goodyear, says the case will detail actual challenges faced by the company, with a focus on global supply chains. Clarkson is enthusiastic and engaged, he says, in co-developing initiatives that develop effective employees with an ability to contribute at Goodyear immediately after joining our team. This partnership is part of Goodyear s strategy of developing top talent for our organization. Dean Dayle Smith says this program will spark the innovative spirit at the core of Clarkson s Business School. Student teams will compete with each other, she says, to offer the best solutions to issues that are testing industry leaders right now. Goodyear and Clarkson are putting up $10,000 in scholarships for the winners. This is a distinctly Clarkson competition. Goodyear is sharing the draft with several faculty members, according to Professor Farzad Mahmoodi, director of Clarkson s Global Supply Chain Management Program. We will tailor the case study to provide students the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills to real-world challenges. The Goodyear team s collaboration with Clarkson faculty may also lead to case scenarios that can be customized for courses in finance and ethics. Goodyear s Ray Robinson says the company s managers plan to work with Clarkson Business School faculty to write cases, introduce them via Skype to students and even provide guest commentary on the cases and student responses. Clarkson students graduate with advanced skills, he says. They exceed our expectations and fit Goodyear s corporate culture and core values. As this partnership grows, we see continued and sustained value for everyone involved: Clarkson students and faculty, as well as Goodyear. Our goal is to be one of the top destinations for students who want to join a global company with a world-class supply chain and procurement organization. Demonstrating the Power of Cooperation with Supply Chain Partners N Negotiating effectively with supply chain partners to achieve the best deal while maintaining their trust is critical to long-term success of the chain. Last fall, veteran supply chain management leader Bob Parker, co-author of Beyond Negotiation: Redeeming Customer- Supplier Relationships, once again shared 40+ years of professional insights with MBA students at Clarkson. Mr. Parker made a resounding case that cooperation is a far more powerful strategy for success than adopting an adversarial approach, as supply chain partners are in an interdependent relationship. He illustrated his point by engaging the students in a new competitive exercise called Red/Blue which demonstrates the role of risk and trust in building and maintaining healthy, long-lasting relationships. MBA students were divided into four teams and for 10 rounds each team had to choose a negotiation strategy without any direct communication with other teams. They could pursue a win-win strategy (red) or a win-lose strategy (blue). Twice during the game (i.e., after the 4 th and 8 th rounds), each team could choose a representative to meet in private with other team representatives to try to arrive at an agreement about how to play each remaining round for maximum benefit. The objective of the exercise was for each team to achieve a positive score. Teams working cooperatively earned fewer points in the short term, but were more likely to win the overall challenge than teams pursuing an adversarial strategy. So how does an incentive to get a bigger payoff in the short-term affect trust and the long-term success of a negotiation? The teams that pursued the win-win strategy the longest fared better in the long run. Teams were less successful if they broke the trust of others in earlier rounds. For successful negotiations, you must separate your needs from your wants and you must understand the other party s needs vs. wants, said Mr. Parker. Each party must insist that their needs get met. Yield your wants only when needed to meet the other party s needs. School of Business Celebrates Reaccreditation by AACSB OOver the past academic year, the Clarkson University School of Business completed its selfstudy of all programs offered by the School and prepared a report following a set of procedures and standards set by our accrediting body, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). The school hosted a peer review team composed of deans from three peer business schools who met with faculty, students, staff, administrators, and reviewed all business programs. In December 2014, the school received congratulatory notification from the Board of Directors indicating that the Board had ratified our extension and maintenance of accreditation. AACSB Accreditation is the hallmark of excellence in business education, and has been earned by less than five percent of the world's business programs. Dean Dayle Smith of the School of Business is exceptionally proud of the achievements of the faculty, staff and students, all of whom made the case for extension of accreditation. Our self-study report was challenging; we were being assessed under the new AACSB standards and had to demonstrate our commitment to innovation, engagement and impact. The visiting peer review team commended the School on its global supply chain management program, quality of instruction and strong corporate partnerships among other areas of excellence. For successful negotiations, you must separate your needs from your wants and you must understand the other party s needs vs. wants. Bob Parker TOP 40 ONLINE MBA PROGRAMS in the Nation U.S. News & World Report 2015

5 Professors Mousavian and Issen Receive Funding from Procter & Gamble I Implementing project management across the organization helps create an effective value chain, particularly in high-risk sectors and markets. Being able to deliver projects on time and within budget often determines whether a company will get the next job or whether its new product hits the market. The School of Business faculty Amir Mousavian and Marshall Issen have received a grant for $10,000 from Procter & Gamble to enhance the Project Management curriculum at Clarkson through involvement of students in project management related activities, conducting innovative research and engaging in networking opportunities. The planned activities include: Establishing the Project Management Institute (PMI) Student Chapter at Clarkson Developing workshops and training sessions to prepare student members for professional certifications offered by the PMI Hosting professional project managers to share their expertise and experiences with students Publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals Presenting at national and international conferences Announcing Clarkson s 15th Annual Executive Seminar in Global Supply Chain Management August 4 7, 2015 Clarkson Campus Join 500 past participants from 75 globally recognized companies including: Accenture Alcoa Avon Products Babcock Power Bank of America Boeing Company Bosch Rexroth Carrier Corporation Corning Incorporated Crane Company Cybex Dell Computer Delta Airlines Dresser-Rand Eastman Kodak Frito-Lay General Dynamics General Electric General Motors Grainger Hewlett-Packard Honeywell International IBM ITT Industries Johnson & Johnson Lockheed Martin Lutron Electronics National Grid Northrop Grumman Osram Sylvania Pfizer Rockwell International Saint-Gobain Sikorsky Aircraft Stanley Black & Decker Texas Instruments Toyota Industrial Equipment Welch Allyn Xerox Corporation The Highly Interactive Format Provides: Team and hands-on activities to reinforce key concepts including simulation and negotiation exercises Networking opportunities with industry professionals and seminar faculty To register or request more information: or contact Tanya Conto, Program Coordinator Fax [email protected] Global Supply Chain Management Program Clarkson University Box 5765, 8 Clarkson Avenue Potsdam, NY EQUAL OPPORTUNITY POLICY Clarkson University does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, color, creed, religion, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, veteran or marital status in provision of educational opportunity or employment opportunities. RC 1.8M 2/15 CP