Proposal: Expanding the Centre for Supply Chain Management

The single most critical issue facing business schools today is how to best support, grow, and
convey the body of knowledge generated by its faculty and other faculty in the field into something both
relevant and comprehensible to its students, alumni, executives and managers. Unfortunately, this issue
is complex and not easy to solve. Academics are notorious for being once or even twice removed from
the "real world" and for using complex jargon and mathematics only published in obscure journals to
solve "problems" that most real firms will never face and that real executives could never benefit from
or even properly absorb. To make matters worse, very few firms ever make known the critical issues
they face.

These same firms often refuse to provide the data, accessibility, time, direction, or even

funding that might be needed to actually attack or solve their problems, instead choosing to either live
with the problem or relying on overtaxed managers to simply react and make-do.

An intermediary between industry and academics is needed to help translate current research into
a form that managers and executives can digest to obtain real value for both themselves and their
organizations. This intermediary must also act a gateway so that the important problems and issues
faced by industry are emphasized and made available to academics to help direct their research agendas
along with data, time, accessibility and funding to help make that research possible.

We propose that with help from interested alumni and industry players that the Centre for Supply
Chain Management here at the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier can be the right
intermediary for the increasingly important field of Supply Chain Management and thereby provide a
model for other Centres at Laurier to copy to serve the diverse areas of interest to business.

More specifically, the Centre for Supply Chain Management needs your help to make the following
happen:

1. Grow our Celebrated Guest Speaker Series. This series brings the very best
academics and practitioners from around North America (and Europe) to present
their current research on Supply Chain Management to our community of academics,
students, executives and local managers. Speakers are normally invited to present
their works on alternating Fridays over the lunch hour during fall and spring terms.
A mailing list of interested individuals is maintained and that list and the public is
invited to hear the speaker, ask questions, and even meet individually with the
speaker (if requested in advance and the speaker's schedule allows).

2. Design, build, and grow a unique interactive website that allows easy access and
group interactions among interested organizations, executives, managers, faculty and
PhD students.

The primary role of the website will be to provide outreach to the

broader interested community. It will provide summaries of current research that has
been rewritten to make the contribution clearer and much more easily accessible for
executives and practicing managers.

It will also provide a clearing house for

information on events, news and other topics/releases important to the Supply Chain
Management area of interest. The machines used to host the website will also be used
to house research data and tools as well as industry SCM software packages. The
first machine to become part of this Centre has already been purchased at Educational
Discount from IBM Canada. Students are already beginning to design and develop
the website but professional development, support and maintenance are needed.

3. Hire a technical writer whose role will be to interview academics about their
research and findings and then create directed summaries of that research and its
contributions that can more readily be absorbed by all interested parties. The fulltime role of the technical writer would be to provide this "translation" on an on-going
basis for the research of all faculty involved with the Centre.

The output of the

technical writer would provide the basic material used to drive the website described
in the point above.

4.

Develop a SCM Centre Roundtable with seats at the table being held by

executives and funded by leading firms interested in Supply Chain Management. The
roles for this roundtable include:

identify critical SCM issues important to their firms to guide research

sponsored by the Centre.

provide data, time, and accessibility about the issues to enable the
research to be undertaken

provide direction and feedback on the academic research currently being

undertaken

help the Centre decide which areas of future research to fund or sponsor
based on their usefulness and relevancy

provide funding for Ph.D. student research and assistantships in areas of

interest to Roundtable members

provide potential Speakers for the the Centre's Celebrated Speaker

Series and for the classroom for both undergraduate and MBA students
in SCM and related courses

provide opportunities for MBA and undergraduate students to become

involved in solving real problems of interest to the firm

take an active role helping to guide both the Centre and its research to
benefit both academics and organizations

5. Develop focused Executive Education programs on both the fundamentals of

Supply Chain Management as well as new topics and newly developed areas of
import. Such programs would be set up as a fee-based modules to be delivered in a
weekend format with top professors primarily using real business cases and
simulations to present the material.

We feel that the Centre with the help of interested individuals and industry can properly develop
and deliver on the above 5 points and perform the necessary functions of an intermediary that can bridge
the gap between academic research and industry to the benefit of both parties. A sample of an
"accessible" research summary is attached along with information on the current activities and
qualifications of the Centre including the research excellence of its faculty over the last decade and a list
of the recent speakers from our Celebrated Speaker Series.

I hope you share the vision and can become involved in shaping the future of the Centre for Supply
Chain Management here at the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier. All comments
welcome.

Director, Centre for Supply Chain Management

Professor of Operations Management and Information Technology
School of Business and Economics
Wilfrid Laurier University