there's scheduling, there's management. Supply chain and supply chain management is

more well established as a field and pretty well served by business schools but they're

not offering the same sort of interdisciplinary approach that we are. With the kind of flexibility

we have with an online program we're able to offer a more specialized program. Ours

is the first one that I've seen that offers a specific focus on the logistics and the

transportation of the supply chain. We've spent a lot of time here at the University

developing personal relationships with people across disciplines but then also understanding

those fields and what they bring to the problem. It's a little overwhelming how effective our

advisory board is. I mean these are really top notch people who don't get to be in the

positions that they're in without being very insightful, very focused, and when they put

their attention on something, they're effective. Our primary goal in engaging them is to ensure

that the curriculum is relevant, to make sure that students we produce have the skills that

they want to hire. And they know that better than we do. The first third of the work load

is really foundations to the fundamental tradeoff that you have to address when you're designing

an efficient supply chain. The second third of the program are what I think of as the

sort of strategic advantages once you have that foundation. In the last part you get

to practice doing that on your own not you know through some structured homework assignment

but a partnership between the student and their employer.

One of the assets to our online program, it actually allows us to more individualize the

program for them. Students who have had different backgrounds, you know some with more extensive

professional training, some with an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering, some with

an undergraduate degree in business. When we match with the right student who wants

a focused program on supply chain transportation and logistics, we can provide it to them in

a way that we wouldn't have been able to with a traditional program.

We really want students to walk away with sort of what I call "strategic knowledge"

so they don't just know how to apply this software tool and figure out which route is

the cheapest, but they have an intuition for what those tradeoffs are and how they play

off in the supply chain and they can be sort of ahead of the computer.