In the early 1980s, Professor Morris Cohen supervised a supply chain research project with IBM that has saved the company millions of dollars in providing spare parts to support after-sales service. The model-based system, still in use today, determined the location and stocking quantity for more than 500,000 parts at more than 10,000 locations. Wharton Professor Marshall Fisher developed systems for agile supply chains linked to customer demand that have significantly reduced costs of overproduction and underproduction in apparel and other industries. Wharton faculty, with other researchers, are now engaged in a major study with a consortium of leading consumer products retailers to create an information technology-based retail structure. Wharton was the first business school to require a course in supply chain management for all MBA students, and the School's PhD program in the field has been a major source of business faculty and leading researchers at other institutions.
Faculty also lead in understanding interlinked supply chains in the age of electronic commerce.
Better than any other business school, we have integrated research and practice. We do that best. In 1911, he was appointed to help set tolls for the Panama Canal. We at Wharton have developed an approach to the field of operations management that captures both its strategic dimension and its linkage to technology and fundamental business processes.