Teaching supply chain management through global projects with global project teams

Production and Operations Management, Spring 2000 by Kopczak, Laura Rock, Fransoo, Jan C

The $25,000 sponsorship fee is shared by the two universities. The fee covers project expenses such as instructor salaries, travel, communications, and production of the final report. In contrast to some MBA project courses that have been initiated recently (Haynes and Setton 1998), the course is not intended to generate revenue for the school.

Student selection proceeds differently at the two universities. Eindhoven requires students to take the course as part of their postgraduate Logistics and Supply Chain Design degree program. The number of students in this program determines the number of projects to be run. (Typically there are 9-12 students available, allowing 3-4 projects to be run.) The program includes 18 months of courses focused on design of supply chains and their control structures. In addition, students complete three part-time, 2-month projects with companies in parallel to the regular courses and a 6-month, full-time internship after the regular courses. For some of the Dutch students, the GPC is their third 2-month project, and they are fairly adept at scoping out and developing solutions for real-world supply chain problems by the time they take the GPC. For others, it may be their second project.

A matching number of Stanford students is selected as follows. At Stanford, the course is an elective. Students must submit resumes with a cover letter explaining their strengths and interest in supply chain management. Once projects have been found, project teams with diverse skills and knowledge are created by selecting students with varying work experience, nationality, skills, and knowledge of SCM and IT. Students come mainly from Masters-level programs in Business, Operations Research, and Industrial Engineering. In addition to having scM expertise on the team, it is advantageous to have someone who has significant work experience to lead the team, as well as someone who is analytical (enjoys modeling), and someone who is strong in strategy and/or marketing.

In early January, the Eindhoven students, professor, and company representatives travel to Stanford to launch the projects. Over 3 days each student team (three students from each university) gets to know one another, learns about the project from the company, develops a work plan for the project, and presents it back to the company for feedback. The work plan focuses on the tasks, schedule, and communications plan. Students also go through an exercise in which they identify their personality type, using the Enneagram system (Baron and Wagele 1994), and brainstorm with members of their team what conflicts may arise because of personality differences and how they can deal with them. Through the exercise the students become aware of how much variation in personality is present among individuals in both cultures. As the groups work together over the semester, the students become cognizant of cultural and individual differences and learn to distinguish between the two.

Either at the kick-off or in the following week, the professors work with each other and with the team to identify theoretical concepts and best practice examples that can be applied and to define how knowledge will be developed within the group. This is important because there will be a difference in knowledge bases between the U.S. and Dutch students, and within the U.S. team. (This will be explained in more detail in Section 4.)