October 1996 € Volume 6 € Number 10

Stop Global Whining - Apply APICS

By James A. Pope, Ph.D., CFPIM

The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the accrediting agency for collegiate schools of business in the United States and Canada, recently ruled that operations management (OM) is no longer an explicit requirement in business schools' curriculum. Does this mean that the AACSB considers manufacturing in general&emdash;and OM in particular&emdash;to no longer be relevant to business education? Will OM academicians go the way of the rotary telephone? Not really. First of all, OM has not been singled out. The AACSB also made similar judgments in areas including marketing, finance and information systems. But the decision is a wake-up call, and the new AACSB standards provide a golden opportunity for APICS to impart its knowledge and practical experience in OM and in business education in general, to make it more customer-driven and relevant to the needs of students and companies alike.

The AACSB ruling means that academicians may no longer live in their ivory towers and ignore the world of practice, and practitioners may no longer avert their eyes from the ivory tower and pretend it is irrelevant. Under the old AACSB standards, there was a laundry list of subjects which, although not required, implied that the school would have a course addressing each of the subject areas. Operations was one of those areas. That means that nearly every accredited business school had at least one operations course.

The result was predictable. Since OM professors were guaranteed a market, we acted like a monopoly utility or a third-world telephone company&emdash;inefficient, unresponsive to customers and hopelessly out of date. We approached OM as if it were an extension of the quantitative methods course, and now that we've lost our monopoly, we whine.

The new standards mean that OM must now compete in the free market of ideas for a place in the business curriculum. The AACSB standards require that business schools be mission-driven. This means that the curriculum must follow from the mission, and the mission must have significant stakeholder input. The stakeholders must be well defined and the school must have processes in place that allow that input to ensure continuous improvement. In short, the faculty must now make the case for OM in the curriculum on an even, competitive plane. If OM is indeed the heart of any business, how difficult could it be to meet that standard?

But who are the stakeholders? Defining who they are is the responsibility of each school, but for OM they certainly include the employers of the graduates, practitioners and professional societies such as APICS. The challenge is to have academicians connect with their stakeholders, and to have APICS involved on a grassroots level through individual membership participation.

My advice to OM and other faculty members is to learn what is really going on in the field. How? By getting out of the classroom and library and going to APICS meetings; taking plant tours and sabbaticals to work on a plant floor for a summer or a semester; doing empirical research on real companies; when testing models, using real data, not random data sets; becoming certified; teaching certification review courses (you'll learn more than you impart); and doing joint research on integration themes with colleagues in other subject areas.

Academicians also must involve practitioners in their programs and can do so by inviting APICS members as speakers for classes or club meetings; starting an APICS student chapter; sponsoring students in international student paper competitions; inviting APICS members to sit in on curriculum meetings; and involving the local APICS chapter in career programs.

APICS members also need to take the initiative by offering to speak at classes or clubs; working with the student chapter; sponsoring student and faculty internships; inviting faculty to work on real problems; working jointly with faculty on applied research problems; and serving on advisory boards or other committees with outside stakeholders.

There is a common interest for academicians and practitioners in the education of business school graduates who will lead industries in the next century. Thus, all parties need to work together to ensure that education includes the skills and knowledge necessary for today's students to succeed as tomorrow's business leaders. It is the body of knowledge that is important, not any specific course. This is the approach APICS has always taken to education in general and certification in particular. Change is often difficult because it disturbs our comfort levels, but we academicians must be willing and able to compete in the free market of ideas and stop whining about the lost protection of outdated standards. n