Dr. Brian Jacobs gave the keynote presentation for the Michigan Lean Consortium's event this month and I found it to be very enlightening.
Dr. Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management at MSU's Broad College of Business. He gave us an overview of their supply chain curriculum and how lean philosophies are incorporated into it.
The key points I took home were:
- Logistics, Operations and Procurement were all given equal weight in the curriculum.
- The course contains a mixture of lectures, guest speakers, field trips (Ex. GM Delta Township Assembly Plant) and hands on exercises. We've all done the lego workshop so why rehash it.
- Waste reduction, respect for people and management philosophy were all well covered.
- The curriculum used to be more manufacturing but is now moved to being more service based in the past 2 years.
During the Q&A section we heard from 3 students who were going to graduate in the spring.
They were all members of the executive board of the Supply Chain Management Association (SCMA) at MSU and they provided us some good first person perspective on the SCM job market.
- GM, Ford, Chrysler, Penske and Whirlpool have all been hiring recently
- At the career fairs they've seen more retailers like Kohl's and JcPenney's, also there has been more pharma in attendance than in previous years
- Anecdotally - it looks like only 10% of the graduating students are staying in Michigan because the search for jobs is taking them elsewhere.
- The SCMA is the 2nd largest student association on campus. #1 is snowboarding...hey...it's Michigan!
I was very impressed with these 3 seniors during the Q&A. They gave straightforward honest answers to some difficult questions.
Dr. Jacobs, The Eli Broad College of Business and MSU should be very proud to have produced such a solid group of graduates.
