UAs Walton College adds Supply Chain Management Department
by March 17, 2011 4:47 pm 60 views
Balancing supply and demand is critical in a challenging economy. To meet a growing need for qualified workers to manage these issues, the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville is creating a Supply Chain Management Department.
The announcement was made Thursday at the Supply Chain Management Research Center’s 10th annual logistics conference, held at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Enterprise Development on the UA campus.
The department will open July 1, officials said. It will be headed by Matthew A. Waller, who holds the Garrison Chair in Supply Chain Management. Students currently majoring in transportation or logistics will be assimilated into the new program.
“As the United States moves toward a more competitive global economy, there will be an increasing demand for more efficient logistics systems and highly qualified people to manage them,” Walton College Dean Dan Worrell said in a news release. “Logistics costs continue to rise, even as attention to the need for sharper cost reductions increases.”
Waller said Walton College started a degree program in transportation in 1970, and added a logistics program in the 1980s. Graduates went on to work for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other major companies in areas such as forecasting demand, warehouse management and transportation planning.
“With the new department, we’re going to another level,” Waller said. “Now we’re broadening even more into supply chain management.
The program will expand to include sourcing, he said. Sourcing involves balancing issues such as cheaper labor with higher transportation and inventory costs.
“This is where a lot of U.S. companies make mistakes,” he said. “They’ll go to China and they’ll say, ‘Oh, this is cheaper,’ but they don’t look at all the other costs, so in the long run it hurts them.”
Another aspect of the supply chain that will get greater emphasis in the new department is operations, Waller said. Specifically, the program will address retail, transportation and consumer-product manufacturing operations.
“Those are some of the things we’re adding to the program to try to make it more relevant to industry in Northwest Arkansas,” Waller said.