www.dcvelocity.com JULY 2016 DC VELOCITY 47
called the Supply Chain Management Curriculum
Development Seminar. We’ve done it for three years
now. This year, representatives from about 30 schools
came to our campus. Our professors explain their curricula, including how they develop their courses, how
they work with industry on projects, and how they fund
their programs. We provide online courses if the attendees want, and we’ll even give them our curricula, syllabi,
tests—whatever they need. We also give them industry
contacts.
We don’t see other academic institutions as competitors. Very few business schools have supply chain
departments. It’s not good for us as a country to have
business schools graduating M.B.A. students who don’t
understand supply chains.
Q Does your supply chain background inform how you carry out your responsibilities as dean?
A It definitely does. As soon as I became interim dean, I started looking at all of the processes in
the college to try to simplify them and make things
more efficient. I launched a Six Sigma initiative, and
the college staff is getting trained and certified. We’ve
already made lots of improvements. Another thing is
that you need cross-functional integration to optimize
the supply chain, and I’m trying to bring about more
integration within the college. I’m also trying to work
more closely with the businesses that are a key part of
our programs. In Northwest Arkansas, we have so many
supply chain-intensive businesses: Wal-Mart Stores and
Tyson Foods, of course, but we also have lots of LTL,
truckload, and intermodal companies, like J.B. Hunt,
FedEx Freight, and Arkansas Best. I think my supply
chain background helps me work with the companies in
our area.
Q What accomplishment in your career are you most proud of?
A I would say it is the formation of our department of supply chain management. When I first arrived
here in 1994, logistics was a subset of the department
of marketing. In 2011, we became the seventh academic
department in the Walton College of Business, and I
was the first department chair. Basically, I created the
business plan and sold the idea to the college. It was
a hard idea to sell right after the Great Recession. We
probably had about 50 to 75 majors in 2011 when we
formed the program. As of today, we have over 450 student majors and some of the highest starting salaries in
the college.
