Introduction to the special issue on teaching supply chain management

Production and Operations Management, Spring 2000 by Johnson, M Eric, Pyke, David F

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON TEACHING SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

M. ERIC JOHNSON AND DAVID F. PYKE Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA

Few topics in production and operations management have had the impact, both on industry and academia, as supply chain management. Managers in nearly every industry have begun to realize that competition in the 21st century will no longer be firm against firm, but supply chain against supply chain. Spawning an entire industry of supply chain software and consulting companies, demand for supply chain expertise exploded in closing years of the 2d millennium. As late as 1995, few business or engineering schools had courses dedicated to supply chain management. Now nearly every top business and engineering school has at least one dedicated course, and many more have integrated supply chain topics into core curricula.

In this issue we explore some of the leading-edge thinking around supply chain education. We begin the issue with our paper that examines how supply chain management is being taught, both in management and engineering schools. We develop a framework for supply chain education and highlight many of the important cases and readings that are available. The next four papers address the use of experiential learning in supply chain education. The paper by Fangruo Chen and Rungson Samroengraja analyzes the popular beer distribution game and shows how the game can be extended to examine many facets of information flows, incentives, and the bullwhip effect. Next Bob Jacobs shows how the beer game can be readily adapted to a web environment with many interesting pedagogical benefits. Joyce Mehring's paper describes a more detailed supply chain simulation used extensively within Siemens to expose managers to supply chain concepts. Edward Anderson and Douglas Morrice describe a version of the beer game that has been adapted to the delivery of a service, rather than a product.

The next three papers cover several broader topics. Ann Campbell, Jarrod Goentzel, and Martin Savelsberg examine the use of industrial supply chain software in the classroom. They provide many useful hints and ideas for integrating popular software into the classroom Thomas Vollmann, Carlos Cordon and Jussi Heikkila present approaches for teaching supply chain concepts to executives. Finally, Laura Kopczak and Jan Fransoo describe their experience with extended global projects jointly conducted by students in the US, Asia, and Europe.

We hope that this special issue will be a valuable resource for instructors of supply chain courses and modules, expanding their repertoire of materials and exercises.

A FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHING SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT*

M. ERIC JOHNSON AND DAVID F. PYKE Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA

The rise of global markets and increasingly virtual companies has focused management attention on competition between supply chains. Many schools of management and engineering are adopting integrated curricula that prepare students to design and manage the resulting complex global web of material and information flows. In this paper, we examine the curricula used by many top engineering and graduate business schools for courses in supply chain management. We present a framework for supply chain management and highlight supporting material and pedagogy. We also classify popular supply chain case studies within our framework and provide useful references to recent business press treatment of these issues.

(SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, EDUCATION)

Introduction

In April, 1995 a panel of academics gathered at the Spring INFORMS meeting to discuss the emerging interest in supply chain management. At that time, only a handful of universities taught a course with the title "supply chain management," although some were teaching supply chain concepts in courses under the label "logistics" or "operations management." Today, many top business schools along with some engineering programs have courses titled "supply chain management" and more are added each year. In nearly all of the top Man programs, core operations management courses have been augmented with significant content on supply chains (van Wassenhove and Corbeyz 1998).

Skeptics would argue that this rush to change curriculum was little more than a repackaging of topics long covered in operations management such as logistics, inventory control, and facility location. Or that, as with quality control in the 1970s and lean manufacturing in the 1980s, supply chain was the popular management fad of the late 1990s. But a closer look at both business practice and MsA programs reveals stronger forces at work, creating an environment ripe for supply chain concepts. Integration, long the dream of management gurus, was slowly sinking into the minds of western managers and business school deans. As we shall see, integration may be the key unifying theme behind supply chain curriculum and practice. For example, product design, manufacturing, and logistics are coming head-to-head with channel design and category management; traditional functional silos of marketing, R&D, manufacturing, and logistics are consolidating into the integrated supply chain.