Supply Chain Management Concentration
The Supply Chain Management (SCM) concentration at NC State's College of Management focuses on the study of business relationships between a company, its suppliers and its customers. Our emphasis on teaching the integration-oriented skills that successful SCM graduates need in a global corporate community gives our students a distinctive edge over programs built on traditional procurement, operations or logistics foundations.
Our SCM curricula was designed to enable our students to learn analytical and problem solving techniques and to apply them to real life situations through project-based learning and internships. They develop in-depth knowledge of the entire flow of the end-to-end supply chain, from raw materials to finished products, with a special emphasis on information and supply flow throughout the process. They also develop the skills needed to write effective management reports, manage teams of workers, and make persuasive management presentations.
The inclusion of teamwork and the mix of engineering and business students provides a real world simulation of the management dynamics encountered in the professional application of an MBA in supply chain management.
About our Integrated Supply Chain Management approach
The industry seeks MBA graduates who can integrate and optimize all the steps required to produce the right amount of the right product or service and deliver it to the end user at the right time. The supply manager’s role is interdisciplinary - a role that spans logistics and distribution, purchasing, manufacturing, inventory management, marketing and product development - and draws skills from many other academic backgrounds.
Beyond purchasing
The purchasing component of this integrated SCM concentration develops major themes and strategies of Supply Chain Management relationships, with a focus on performance measurement, relationship assessment, negotiation, contracting, and managing conflict in business relationships in a globally integrated supply chain. In this context, relationships may exist between internal functional groups, as well as with suppliers and/or customers. The purchasing component focuses on collaboration and strategy execution, with an emphasis on assessment, establishing metrics and expectations, contracting, and managing external business relationships in sourcing, logistics and operations. However, many of the concepts will be explored primarily from the perspective of the purchasing/sourcing perspective, with less emphasis on the marketing/sales perspective.
Beyond logistics
The logistics component utilizes a variety of tools and frameworks that are presented to help students understand the basis behind effective logistics decision-making and how it relates to broader issues in managing the entire supply chain and fulfilling the strategic objectives of a firm. The methods used to convey and develop these ideas include a mix of traditional lecture, interactive class discussion, case study analysis, spreadsheet exercises, and independent research. Course material is drawn from a number of sources, including a recently published textbook, recent articles from the popular business press, and articles from academic journals
Industry/University Partnership
The SCM concentration at NC State's College of Management is supported by the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative (SCRC), a distinctive industry/university partnership representing a broad spectrum of industries dedicated to the development of future supply chain professionals. Through the SCRC, students and faculty interact regularly with partner companies to solve real industry problems through course projects and focused research assignments.
This partnership serves our students by providing an opportunity to work with professional supply chain managers at all levels of responsibility on real industry problems through structured projects as part of their coursework. It serves SCRC member companies by bringing applied research and knowledge creation to help them achieve supply chain excellence. Projects tackled in the course of the academic program cover a wide range of supply chain activities and are designed as an integral aspect of all required SCM courses, providing students opportunities for practical application of learned skills.
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