Practicum Supply Chain Courses
NC State offers four supply chain courses that provide students the opportunity to work on practicum projects with our corporate sponsors. Selected project proposals are assigned to teams from one of these four courses, outlined below, depending on the proposal’s fit with the educational goals of the course in which the students are enrolled.
BUS 479: Supply Chain Management Undergraduate Practicum
This is a SCM concentration course consisting of a team-based project working with a Supply Chain Resource Cooperative (SCRC) partner company to resolve real-world SCM issues. There is typically a mix of projects that focus on SCM topics such as procurement, logistics, transportation, distribution, materials management, forecasting, sustainability, and operations; yet remain integrated across a variety of SCM issues.
Project details
The practicum project makes up the entirety of the curriculum for this undergraduate supply chain course, and lasts for a duration of 15 weeks. Student teams consist of 3 – 4 students, and projects focus on skill building experiences in technical supply chain analysis, research, project management, presenting, teamwork, and communications. Projects will vary in scope depending on the sponsoring company’s supply chain issues and improvement initiatives. Student teams are required to meet with their company project manager once per week. The students also meet weekly as a team and with their NC State executive advisor.
MBA 541: Supply Management
This course is designed around stages in the category management process including stakeholder engagement, spend analysis, market intelligence, strategic sourcing, negotiation, relational contracting, and on-going management of supply chain relationships. Every student will participate in a team-based supply chain project with an organization and will learn the team-based, deadline-driven nature of supply chain initiatives in a real-company setting.
Project details
Projects are only a portion of this course’s contentand last for a duration of 10 weeks. Emphasis is placed on the importance of collaboration through the application of practical tools and approaches that drive mutually beneficial outcomes. Student teams consist of 3 – 4 MBA and graduate engineering students (including Masters of Systems Engineering), full time or professional students. Projects will pertain to key topics addressed in the course curriculum as outlined above. Student teams are required to meet with their project manager and executive advisor at least once per week.
MBA 549: Supply Chain Practicum
This is a required course in the SCM focus area. This course is comprised of a team-based project working on an SCRC partner company’s SCM issues. Students will study technical supply chain issues particular to each project and will learn the team-based, deadline-driven nature of supply chain initiatives in a real company setting.
Project details
The practicum project makes up the entirety of the curriculum for this graduate (MBA) supply chain course, and lasts for a duration of 15 weeks. Student teams consist of 3 – 4 MBA and graduate engineering students (including Masters of Systems Engineering). Projects are more complex and vary in scope depending on the sponsoring company’s supply chain issues and improvement initiatives, however will focus on supply chain relationships, physical flows, and/or information flows. Student teams are required to meet with their company project manager once per week. The students also meet weekly as a team and with their NC State executive advisor.
MBA 590: Analytical Supply Chain Management
The objective of this MBA course is to build an understanding of how to manage and improve the performance (efficiency and responsiveness) of operations and supply chains through decision making that is based on analysis and facts, rather than intuition. The course introduces fundamental aspects of operations and supply chain management as well as analytical modeling tools and techniques that can be used to support decision making (e.g., optimization, regression analysis, simulation). The approach taken in the course is entirely example-based and hands-on since all these techniques will be implemented in Excel, either with Excel’s built-in tools or with Excel add-ins.
Project details
Projects are only a portion of this course’s content, and last for a duration of 10 weeks. Student teams consist of 3 – 4 MBA students. Projects will pertain to key topics addressed in the course curriculum as outlined above. Student teams are required to meet with their project manager and executive advisor at least once per week.