Optimizing operations at TEPCO and DHL: Analytic Frameworks for Management (MiM)

The Fall 2022 lineup of four-weekday intensive courses for students of the MSc in Management program kicked off with a new course entitled "Analytic Frameworks for Management." Taught by Prof. Katsunobu Sasanuma, who earned his Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management and the 2016 William W. Cooper Doctoral Dissertation Award at Carnegie Mellon University, the course focuses on developing participants' ability to solve hard problems in risk and supply chain management that do not have formulaic solutions.

During the first day of the course, 77 participants from 30 countries were asked to give their analyses of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, identifying areas in which more effective risk management was needed. The exercise demonstrated how managers lacking insight rely too heavily on automated systems, thus missing important opportunities to achieve goals or prevent failure. Takeaways from that discussion were applied in a group exercise, in which participants banded together to identify ways to drastically reduce carbon emissions in the transportation of LCD TVs from their manufacturing bases to a DHL distribution center with just a small increase in the supply chain budget and the SOLVER tool in Microsoft Excel.

Participant-centered and practice-oriented learning, extracting frameworks from real-life cases and applying them to current business problems and challenges through discussion, fieldwork, and group experimentation, provide simulated experiences that prove essential for the development of tomorrow's business leaders and team managers.