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‘Blue Sky’ Project Provides Hands-on Learning for MBA Student, Results for Company Sponsor

Gabriel Ives, a second-year NC State Jenkins MBA student in the North Carolina State University College of Management, found himself working on such a project as part of his Duke Energy Graduate Assistantship this past year.

Duke Energy offers the two-year assistantship to supply chain students in the Jenkins MBA program through its involvement with the college’s Supply Chain Resource Cooperative (SCRC). The SCRC coordinates practicum courses for the college’s graduate and undergraduate supply chain management students.

Ives’ projects at Duke Energy this past year, he said, “allowed me to see how the concepts learned in the classroom carried over” into the business world. That’s the goal of the practicum courses, said Clyde Crider, newly appointed co-director of the SCRC. He replaces Steve Edwards who retired in June after serving as SCRC co-director for the past ten years. Robert Handfield, Bank of America University Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management in the College of Management, is also co-director of the SCRC.

“I’ve gained a lot of experience this past year,” Ives said. “Coming into the scholarship, I had not had much previous exposure to the supply chain management world. Working with Duke Energy, I’ve gotten some real world, hands-on tangible problem-solving skills through the projects I worked on with Curtis Price, my assistantship supervisor, and other members of the Duke Energy supply chain group.”

For example, he said, “I never realized that warehousing, logistics, and job design – some of the basic nuts and bolts, the fundamentals, of day-to-day supply management – would really be so valuable. I’ve learned a lot this year.”

Proof of what he learned can be seen in a project that involved researching best practices in warehouse operations located in the Midwest and the Carolinas, and then making recommendations and developing an implementation plan that included identifying the roles and responsibilities of the various job titles within a warehouse unit, looking at ways to maximize employees’ knowledge, skill sets and abilities.

‘It was all about innovation in processes and practices,” Ives said of the project. Starting with “a clean slate,” he was charged with developing a “blue sky, green field best practices warehouse model, and then incorporating that model into Duke Energy’s reality wherever possible.”

After extensive research, Ives and his project supervisor at the SCRC presented their recommendations to Duke Energy, including “ideal job designs, titles and responsibilities, which we incorporated into warehouse best practices.”

As he starts his second year in the Jenkins MBA program, Ives is also gearing up to start the second phase of the warehousing project, “this time looking at sourcing and administrative functions, with a focus on supply chain core competencies,” he said.

While these assignments may seem like full time jobs in themselves, Ives said balancing such real world experiences with coursework is part of the learning process in the Jenkins MBA program.

“One of the things this program teaches you to do is to manage your time,” he said. “It was a challenge to do that,” he admits, but he has managed to balance the 20 hours or so per week that he spends on his Duke Energy GA position with his responsibilities as a student.

Duke Energy cites the time factor as one of the benefits it derives from its involvement with the SCRC as well. As the organization has become leaner, its full time staff doesn’t have time to take on such research projects, Price said. “We utilize our involvement with the SCRC program for areas where we need to do some work in, but where we don’t necessarily have the resources to assign it internally on a full time basis. The students have really helped us out.”

The students also bring “an outside perspective that cuts across industries other than utilities,” Price said. “I think in utilities, we get kind of focused on what we do internally, so it’s hard to look outside that box. The students bring a different perspective to it.”

Previous Duke Energy Graduate Assistantship recipients from the NC State Jenkins MBA program are Bert Coslow, who had a two year assignment and graduated in 2009, and Joe Reuss, who had a one year assignment and graduated in 2007.

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