Marquette University’s Center for Supply Chain Management, part of its College of Business Administration, has created a new series of courses designed for manufacturing industry executives in need of continuing education – the first such program from an institute of higher education in Wisconsin.
The series of classes was designed to meet the needs of manufacturing companies who may have been promoted from middle management positions to executive roles in recent years, said Doug Fisher, assistant professor at Marquette and co-director of the Center for Supply Chain Management.
“Most companies are now saying, ‘In the last two to three years we have done a good job of reducing our head count, and we now want to promote some of our people, but they don’t necessarily have all of the skill sets,'” Fisher said. “And (these companies) are looking for other avenues to get it done.”
This will be the second year that Marquette will offer the classes through its Center for Supply Chain Management. Last fall it offered courses on the fundamentals of supply chain management and negotiations with an emphasis on contracts. This school year, the center will also offer a course on indirect procurement, which will offer manufacturing executives information about buying computers, copier paper and other office and corporate supplies that they do not typically deal with in the industrial supply chain.
Courses are taught over two full days, from 8 a.m. to about 5 p.m. on the first day and from 8 a.m. until mid afternoon on the second day. A networking and dinner reception follows the first day’s class, even though students are assigned homework.
“The classes are all self-contained, and there is pre-class homework and homework during the class,” Fisher said. “This is an accelerated case approach.”
Marquette’s classes are designed to give Milwaukee-area manufacturing companies a way to develop their top management without sending them out of town for several days. The university says the closest comparable executive education courses are at Penn State University. Marquette’s courses cost $1,800 per student, which Fisher says is competitive with comparable programs. However it allows Milwaukee area attendees to sleep at home – saving their employers airfare and hotel fees.
“By doing this at Marquette, there are no travel expenses, and it becomes a more efficient mechanism to get it done,” Fisher said.
More importantly, the new course offers a chance for Marquette to deepen its connections with some of the largest companies in metro Milwaukee. Last year, when the courses were offered for the first time, companies such as Rockwell Automation, MillerCoors, Direct Supply, HK Systems, Johnson Controls, Wisconsin Energy Corp. and Kohler sent employees.
“Marquette has so much to offer, and it’s been pretty quiet for a long time,” Fisher said. “This is a good thing.”
Aside from the standard courses that the Center for Supply Chain Management is developing for its executive education program, it will also offer topic-specific classes and company-specific leadership training programs for individual employers. The center has already run topic-specific classes for Rockwell Automation, and company-specific programs for managers at Direct Supply, Fisher said.
So far, executive development classes have been taught by Marquette faculty. However, as the center develops more courses, it will be able to involve faculty from other universities.
“We can bring in faculty from the West Coast or Harvard – if we have other (faculty) in our network and they are the best fit, we’ll bring them in,” Fisher said. “This is still a Marquette product. We’ll find the best in breed wherever we can.”
This fall, Marquette will offer the supply chain fundamentals course on Oct. 7-8 and its negotiations course on Dec. 9-10. Additional courses will be scheduled in the spring, Fisher said.
Although the executive education series is still in its infancy, the university has had significant response.
“We started from a base of nobody knowing that we do this, but our database is growing,” Fisher said. “We can reach a lot more people today.”
The College of Business is likely to use the executive education program that the Center for Supply Chain Management is developing as a model for more business outreach education programming.
“(Linda Salchenberger, dean of Marquette’s College of Business Administration) would like to have a corporate executive education focus,” Fisher said. “This is our first toe in the water, sort of a trial balloon. She supports it and believes in it.”
For more information about Marquette University’s continuing education program for manufacturing executives, visit http://go.mu.edu/SupplyChainCE, call Crystal James at (414) 288-0670 or email her at: crystal.james@marquette.edu.
