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 project concludes with a 45-minute debrief session in which the companies, team members, and professors discuss how they as individuals experienced the course (project) and what they would do differently "next time." This is done in a very open and positive way, so that the impressions and perspectives of the different students can come out. After letting the conversation flow for some time, we ask questions such as, "how did the kick-off contribute to the success of the project-what went wrong and what went right?" and "what difficulties did you as a team experience during the project?" Through the session, the students reflect on the process of running a global project, shifting away from the focus on project content that has dominated their thinking as they prepared for the final presentation. We find the students to be quite mature in recognizing their own failings and translate this understanding into an assessment of what they would do differently "next time around." These debriefs have also been instrumental in improving our class over the years.

3. Example: Reverse Logistics at Quantum

In this section, we describe a project in order to give an example of the scope and nature of a typical GPC project in the supply chain domain. The project was carried out for Quantum Corporation, a manufacturer of hard disk drives and addressed their reverse supply chain. The project team consisted of three students from the Eindhoven Logistics and Supply Chain Design program, one from Stanford's Industrial Engineering program, and two Stanford Msn students.

The Quantum project addressed the development of a service product for Quantum. In the current structure, the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) (e.g., Compaq), the OEM's customers, and the hard disk drive manufacturer keep swap stocks to immediately replace a nonfunctioning disk drive with a new or repaired one. The student team designed a new concept, to be presented by Quantum as a service product to the OEM. The concept included reduction of the swap stocks in the system, increasing the frequency of component deliveries, reducing the total flow of broken components through early screening of components that only appear to be broken, and streamlining of the customer interface. The whole concept was packaged as a complete service product, to be offered to the OEM in order to increase consumer satisfaction and reduce costs for both the OEM and Quantum.

The Stanford students visited Quantum's corporate-level service organization, located in Milpitas, California. (The project liaison was a Milpitas employee.) The Eindhoven students visited Quantum's European service site in Dundalk, Ireland. They also contacted some oEMs to get their inputs. The students held regular telephone and videoconferences, sometimes including the Quantum liaison.

Quantum asked the students to look at the problem from four points of view:

1. Marketing: propose a service product and describe its appeal to ors and end users;

2. Cost/service: analyze how offering the proposed product would affect costs and service along the supply chain;