Customized Education Counts

Ten years ago, only the largest companies with the deepest pockets called on university supply chain programs to develop customized curriculums for their teams. Fast forward to 2014 and interest in tailored, company-specific executive education content is at an all-time high.

August 21, 2014

There was a time when any reference to “customized education” immediately conjured up big dollar signs for companies looking for the most effective and efficient ways to educate their supply chain organizations. Ten years ago, for example, only the largest companies with the deepest pockets called on university supply chain programs to develop customized curriculums for their teams. Fast forward to 2014 and interest in tailored, company-specific executive education content is at an all-time high.

“In general, the executive education market has dramatically shifted from ‘open enrollment’ (i.e., on-site, multi-company affairs) general programs to more customized options,” says Ravi Anupindi, faculty director for the Master of Supply Chain Management Program at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “This trend has been growing for a while. Look at any business school right now and custom [programs] have become a much larger fraction of their revenue base and program offering, compared to open enrollment.”

Nick Little, assistant director of executive development programs for Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business, has also detected increased interest in custom supply chain options. Calling open enrollment the “build it and hope they will come” approach to such education, Little says that over time the strategy of creating content that applies to as many companies as possible is passé. Instead, he says more schools are helping to address organization-specific supply chain issues rather than just handing out possible solutions.

Although both open enrollment and customization remain viable options for companies, Little says firms that are seeking a return on investment (ROI) from the experience tend to steer more towards the latter. “It’s easier to measure the ROI of a custom program,” he notes, “because companies can set up assignments and project goals, and then have the program presenters monitor progress and achievement.” From that exercise, companies can walk away with a solid financial number that reflects savings, benefits, improvements, growth, or other measures.

“Quite often that ROI can be very high because attendees come away from the experience highly energized and ready to tackle difficult issues,” says Little. “Plus, they know that their companies have invested in the time and expense of sending them to the program. That can be very motivating.”

In this article, we’ll explore the key drivers of the custom supply chain education movement, review the various options that companies have at their avail, and discuss the future educational trends that supply chain organizations should keep an eye on.

Key Drivers of the Custom Movement
From the company perspective, several forces are driving interest in custom supply chain programs, according to Anupindi, who says cost is the first and most obvious impetus. A company that needs to train 35 people, for example, could wind up having to send those employees to multiple locations for several months (or even years) to get the training completed. “Looking at that type of scale, the open enrollment option becomes too expensive for that company,” Anupindi says.

The second driver is simply the “custom” prefix, which is typically associated with non-generic knowledge and information that isn’t delivered in the open enrollment setting. “The idea is that by using a custom approach, students will come away with a least some information that’s relevant to the challenges that their companies are facing,” Anupindi explains, noting that the typical back-and-forth dialogue that takes place between the program’s executive sponsors and faculty members helps to ensure that the goal is met.

At Vantage Partners in Boston, Jonathan Hughes, partner, says demand for customized supply chain training appears to be driven mostly by supply chain, procurement, and/or sourcing organizations that are experiencing transformations. “They’re trying to evolve away from a more transactional and tactical way of operating,” says Hughes, “to a much more strategic function within the enterprise.” As part of that process, he says organizations are identifying major business problems that need to be solved—a conundrum that leads many of them to explore customized education versus open enrollment.

“Companies that are in that situation are certainly willing to invest more, but they also have much higher expectations of what the training will look like and what it will deliver,” Hughes explains. “Customized training does provide a better fit and delivers better value for companies or functional organizations that are in that kind of situation.”

The Pros and Cons of Customization
On one hand, customized programs give organizations the opportunity to get pretty granular when it comes to their target supply chain curriculums. They don’t have to send multiple employees to various programs around the country. Instead, they can have a fairly large group of employees educated on key, company-centric topics in one fell swoop and for one fee.

On the other hand, customized programs also present their fair share of challenges for companies. For starters, there’s no opportunity for cross-company knowledge sharing and brainstorming. And, because the curriculum is developed for (and sometimes even by) the specific company, it is often lacking in diversity and depth.

“We’ve run into situations where the companies develop the guidelines themselves and ask us to teach it to their employees,” says Don Klock, professor of supply chain management and business director at Rutgers Center for Supply Chain Management. And while the gesture may be well intentioned, Klock says teaching someone else’s material can be extremely challenging. “We did this with a large computer manufacturer a few years ago and I literally had to go through every slide with a fine-tooth comb,” says Klock. “I spent hours learning their vernacular and terms.”

In assessing the downsides of custom supply chain programs, Anupindi says organizations must rely solely on faculty members to provide an “outside looking in” viewpoint. In other words, those teachers are the only third parties in the room that are delivering the content, presenting the case studies, and offering up the solutions. In an open enrollment setting, students interact directly with other firms and can use those interactions to benchmark their own progress and bounce ideas off one another.

But the beauty of customization, says Klock, is that companies get an educational foundation that rings true to their specific organizations—including vocabulary, values, people, and so forth. And the fact that the content is customized allows firms to hone their offering in a way that generic coursework can’t match. If production planning is a pain point within the company, for example, then the supply chain executive education can easily be tailored to address and reinforce that point. “That’s the power of customized education,” Klock says. 

On the Near Horizon 
As executive education continues to morph and evolve, so too do the number of delivery options available to companies. And while open enrollment courses aren’t going away anytime soon, according to the experts interviewed for this article, they are being augmented by newer options and opportunities. Anupindi, for example, says he’s seeing more interest in what he calls “short-term training programs” that hit on specific topics and issues. He’s also noticed that more organizations want to fill the gap that exists between general knowledge and action. “Companies are starting to think about how much money is being spent on executive education,” says Anupindi, “and how much of the information learned is being made actionable.”

Calling executive education a “very reactive marketplace,” Little says predicting what’s coming around the next corner is difficult at best. “The very dynamic of the space is stimulated by the problems that companies are facing, so trying to predict what’s next can be difficult,” says Little, who expects to see a growing interest in understanding the end-to-end supply chain across borders, rather than just within the functional boundaries of a single organization. “Companies need to know how to work more efficiently and effectively with trading partners (both suppliers and customers),” says Little, “to ensure that value is being added through every step of the supply chain process for the end consumer.”

On the delivery side, Klock expects the lines drawn between customized supply chain education and online options to blur over the next few years as more companies turn to the web for educational opportunities. “Not many people are there yet, but it’s going to happen,” says Klock. “Online programs are getting better every year and [most] schools are doing some form of it, either hybrid or full online. Why wouldn’t a company approach a third party about creating an online program?”

Klock adds that while Rutgers has yet to receive such a request, the online option is the next logical step in the progression of executive supply chain education. And with the supply chain becoming more global in nature, the online venue will be particularly attractive for companies with multi-national operations. “We’re already seeing this movement on the MBA side, so why not the supply chain too?” Klock asks. “In the next five years it’s an area that will certainly accelerate due to the growing mobility and the increasingly global
business environment.”