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About the Author: Julie Niederhoff, Ph.D., associate professor of marketing and supply chain management; Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University

One of the biggest challenges facing our industry is the speed of industry growth compared to the speed of trained professionals entering the field. With a shortage of talent, firms have created incentives to identify top talent early and capture their attention. They aim to demonstrate how a career at their company will be a great fit to a potential employee’s interests.

Many of our students are first introduced to the field through an operations or supply chain class as part of a required core curriculum. In those 15 to 20 weeks, faculty are required to teach the mechanics and vocabulary of operations while also showing students the exciting, dynamic and
challenging nature of the field. For many students,
this classroom experience shifts their careers toward operations and supply chain management, but doing so requires passionate, creative and engaging material.

It’s a tall order, but one of the most effective ways for students to see the power and importance of good supply chain management is through case studies. A week of lectures, notes and examples cannot compare with engaging in a real case that immerses students in the complexities of a real company and challenges them to consider tough questions:

• What drivers created this system?
• What are the options we can consider in the short term, near term and long term?
• How might those perform, why could they fail, and how would we know if it failed or succeeded?

To truly engage students, cases must be interesting, complex and relevant. Many cases are classics, and much like how law students study classic outcomes to learn precedence, students can still understand the major trade-offs and challenges of the field through classic cases. But cases can quickly become outdated as technology, trade agreements and other factors change. This is where industry partners can come in and help shape the training of the students while simultaneously improving their own ability to recruit top talent.

Many schools host case competitions throughout the year. These events bring in teams of students from dozens of schools who are presented with brand-new, never-before-seen cases to analyze and present within days or weeks. Ideally, these cases are “live” cases, meaning real representatives of the company help provide the details for faculty to write the case. It often also means company representatives are on hand to help evaluate the solutions put forth by the teams. Teams engage with the case and representatives in meaningful problem-solving ways, sparking more interest and excitement about the field than any other classroom experience.

Great cases can come from multi-national industry leaders just as well as from small start-ups and established medium-sized firms. Strategic operations, establishing meaningful measurements and goalposts, and developing a plan for implementation are basic skills needed for any sized firm. From a student learning perspective, industry challenges are fairly consistent across all firms. For example, fulfilling orders, negotiating supply options, measuring quality, and improving efficiency are challenging goals for most firms. The value gained from case studies attempts to balance these often conflicting goals in a setting with a variety of other constraints such as space, budgets, brand reputation and the managerial structure of each firm.

Companies get a lot of benefits from their role in supporting a case competition, too. Students develop a better understanding of the company and the types of interesting problems they might be asked to work on, which can increase recruitment. Companies can also identify top talent in what amounts to an interview process.

These opportunities are available, but will not come to you. In fact, companies might initiate such collaboration and are likely to find a receptive audience in academia.