Executive Education

Description
Enterprises are becoming increasingly global, with supply chains and manufacturing processes spanning oceans and continents. To navigate the global marketplace, senior managers need to know how to plan the most efficient use of material resources, as well as manage more complicated global networks and optimize service and quality.

They need to be able to create a dynamic operations strategy that fosters:

• continuous, incremental improvement
  
• groundbreaking innovation, and
  
• competitive market advantage
  

In this two-day program, senior managers will learn new approaches to operations strategy that were developed at MIT and based on best-practice research conducted among the world's leading manufacturing companies.

Led by senior School faculty, Developing a Leading Edge Operations Strategy offers an analytic view of operations and strategic insights into:

• vertical integration and the factors that affect strategic decisions
  
• outsourcing, supplier power and trends in supplier management
  
• global facility network strategies and the future of supply chain management
  
• strategic implications of process technologies
  
• capacity and risk management, including capacity factors, supply and demand management and the role of services
  
• how to survive in a world of outsourcing, and how to decide whether and where to go

The program draws on real issues confronting manufacturing and service companies today and provides a strategic framework for making the kinds of major decisions every company faces:

• how do we deal with globalization?
  
• should we outsource?
  
• how far should we go with outsourcing?
  
• where should we be?
  

Program Topics

• The Principles of Operations Strategy
  
• Vertical Integration: Factors That Affect Decisions
  
• Outsourcing and Supplier Management
  
• Facilities strategy and globalization
  
• Risk Management: Supply and Demand
  
• Analyzing Service Operations
  
• Globalization Implications: Surviving in a World of Outsourcing

The Participants
This program is appropriate for senior managers from manufacturing and service industries who are responsible for developing and executing operations strategy, including: chief operating officers, strategic planners, vice presidents of business strategy, operations, supply chain management, services and product development, operations general managers, and senior project and program executives.

Faculty
Charles H. Fine, Chrysler LFM Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, studies technology supply chains. Author of Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage, Fine focuses on assessing the present and future profitability and strategic leverage of the various sectors in the supply chain. He also concentrates on determining the boundaries and identity of an organization - designing a supply chain based on strategic as well as logistical assessment. In addition, he looks at assembling the capability to realize organizational boundaries of choice and to manage within and across those boundaries.

Janice Klein studies the introduction of new ideas into the workplace. She focuses on integrating the social and technical aspects of organizational change, through research, teaching, and consulting that are grounded in such resources and initiatives as lean production systems, job design, and the changing role of lower levels of management in response to the introduction of new technology and employee empowerment. Klein is currently studying the impact of organizational culture on knowledge transfer and the development and maintenance of high performance, globally dispersed teams. General Expertise: Human resource management, operations management, organizational change.

Donald B. Rosenfield, Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is an expert on operations management and strategy. He is Director of the Leaders for Manufacturing Program (a dual degree Masters program run by the School of Management and the School of Engineering in partnership with leading global corporations). He has worked principally in the areas of manufacturing strategy and supply chain management