YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Before enrolling at Youngstown State University, Aidan Gray worked for an electronics company in Pittsburgh, assembling continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machines.
It was during Covid and Gray witnessed first-hand the importance of supply chain management to business and industry.
“I got to see how things would cease, because we didn’t have parts coming from China or from wherever they were coming from,” says the Valley native whose family now lives in the Pittsburgh area. “I got to see how that immediately stopped everything.”
That piqued his interest in the field and after enrolling at YSU’s Williamson College of Business Administration, Gray, who’s in the U.S. Army ROTC program, started taking advantage of the college’s supply chain management concentration.
“Ideally, after I’m done with my career in the Army, I would like to be an operations manager or supply chain manager at some larger corporations, just to be able to take any knowledge I have gained and apply it, but also mentor other people so that they can pick it up when I’m done. Just because I take a lot of joy out of watching other people succeed too,” Gray says.
In the News
Both YSU and Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa., added or resurrected supply chain management as a concentration within the last few years. Grove City College in Grove City, Pa., began offering a major in the field in 2022.
Alina Marculetiu, an assistant professor of management and marketing at YSU’s Williamson College, says the college’s supply chain management concentration is gaining traction among students. She attributes that to more attention stemming from world events, including Covid.
Grove City graduated its first class of supply chain management majors in spring 2023.
That first class had three students. David Butler, associate professor of supply chain management/international business in Grove City’s Winklevoss School of Business, says the number of students majoring in the subject has since grown to double digits.
He attributes that to more focus during the last five years on the importance of supply chain management.
“People are more aware of the strategic importance of it,” says Butler, who spent 30 years in industry before joining the Grove City faculty in 2020. “And so, as a result, parents are telling students, ‘You ought to look at that,’ or students are seeing that this is what’s being talked about. This is a marketable career field for me to be in…”
Robert Badowski, assistant professor and chairman of the School of Business at Westminster, arrived at the college in 2016.
He wanted to bring supply chain management to the college, but found it was never a good time.
“And then Covid hit and exposed issues in supply chain…so I figured I’d strike while the iron was hot…,” he says.
Supply chain was on the news and businesses and organizations were talking about the effects of supply chain issues on their operations, he says.
Careers
Marculetiu lists a slew of careers for which supply chain management study prepares students. That includes operations manager, purchaser, scheduler, sourcing manager, forecaster, logistics manager, supply chain analytics and many others.
“There are jobs in any of these areas,” she adds. “Other jobs that are interesting – supply chain analytics is big right now because those are the sort of problem finders, and there are a lot of problems in supply chains.”
Butler says supply chain includes many professions.
“When we talk supply chain, there’s several main functions of a supply chain,” he says, listing purchasing/procurement, manufacturing and logistics.
Logistics includes multiple functions including transportation, warehousing and distribution and customer service.
“And then service, which is an often-ignored part of it,” Butler adds. “Service – some would call it reverse logistics. This is repair and return of a product. The reason it’s called reverse logistics [is] instead of moving stuff out to a customer, you are bringing it back from the customer.”
With society’s focus on sustainability – repurposing, recycling and reusing – the service component takes on increased importance, he explains. Sales and operations planning is another function.
“So, I have students that are buyers,” Butler says. “They come out of college, and they go into the procurement space as a buyer. I have students come out of school and they go into transportation and that is multiple forms.”
While most people don’t think much about it, supply chain management plays a role in their daily lives.
“We order from Amazon and we’re like, yeah, it’ll be here tomorrow,” Badowski says. “But we don’t think about the journey, and somebody’s got to plan that entire journey out.”
That journey may start with the ordered item arriving on a ship, being transported by truck to a warehouse facility before another truck brings it to the home of the person who ordered it, he points out.
“One little kink in that supply chain can have ripple effects the whole way down,” Badowski relates.
Analytics and data-driven decision-making play key roles in supply chain management as well.
“How do Amazon delivery drivers know what to deliver first?” Badowski says. “They don’t just give them a truck and say, go deliver these things. There’s a process by which they deliver these things. So, we have to figure out, if you’re a trucking company, you know, do we have enough trucks? What kind of trucks do we have? Are they going to be able to get from here to there? What kind of weather is involved, what kind of traffic’s involved?”
That all involves analytics, he says. Data can be analyzed to create the best route and the most cost-effective way to deliver things, he adds.
Certain Uncertainty
People who work in supply chain management must be aware of conditions across the world that could affect it, from tariffs to union strikes to attacks on cargo ships.
“One thing that’s certain about supply chains: there will always be uncertainty,” Marculetiu says.
She brings up current events and potential effects on the supply chain in class. But professors don’t teach students a particular way to solve a problem
“You cannot avoid this uncertainty,” Marculetiu notes. “You can prepare that there will be uncertainty.”
That involves having a Plan B, such as having another company from which to secure goods.
“This is more of a strategy that supply chains adopt now – having more than one supplier,” she explains. “But not too many, because then you have too many relationships to deal with.”
That could be costly but also, if you’re not a big customer of a particular supplier, you’re not going to be prioritized, Marculetiu says.
“And we do have a module that sort of teaches students to understand, sort of the hidden costs…,” she says, “because there is this concept of what’s called landed costs. If you buy something from overseas, it’s really what does it take to bring the product to your door.”
If you buy coffee, for example, you’re going to have to pay for the good itself as well as some transportation and warehousing fees, tariffs and other fees, which all add up to landed cost.
For Gray, the YSU senior, learning about supply chain management and the factors affecting it put into perspective the halted operations he witnessed working for that electronics manufacturer.
It also helped cement his career choice.
“I think the Williamson College of Business has definitely set me up for success,” he says. “They all, like the academic advisers and mentors there and professors as well, are all just great people. They have definitely helped forge my path for me to really know where I’m going.”