For conceiving and building modern systems of experimental design based on contemporary methods for parameter estimation to provide quality improvements.

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made "important contributions to engineering theory and practice, including significant contributions to the literature of engineering theory and practice," and those who have demonstrated accomplishment in "the pioneering of new fields of engineering, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."

The School of Industrial and Systems Engineering is the largest such program in the United States and has consistently been ranked the number one program in industrial/manufacturing engineering by US News and World Reports. Women and underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply. Further information about the School can be found at our website: http://www.isye.gatech.edu. This position is an academic, tenure-track position.

Please send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, and three letters of reference to:

Search Committee for the Hunter Chair
c/o Chelsea C. White III
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0205

Georgia Tech is an Equal Education and Employment Institution and a unit of the University System of Georgia.

The technique, known as "wavelet bootstrapping" or "wavestrapping," has applications in the geophysical sciences, bioinformatics, medical imaging, nanotechnology and other areas. It can also be useful for rapidly obtaining information from small data sets in such applications as medical diagnostics.

Wavelets are mathematical functions that have become increasingly important to researchers because of their ability to analyze data sets that are difficult to understand using traditional techniques such as Fast Fourier Transform. For instance, signals within noisy data recorded in the time domain can become more meaningful when analyzed in the wavelet domain.

Wavestrapping was pioneered by University of Washington researchers, who applied wavelet transforms to an established statistical re-sampling technique known as bootstrapping, which is used to extract additional information from single data runs. The marriage of bootstrapping and wavelets offers a new tool for the analysis of data sets that would otherwise be difficult to study because of correlation and time-dependency issues.

"The new thing here is re-sampling, but not in the time domain, which would be nearly impossible because of the strong dependence of data or correlation of data," said Brani Vidakovic, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. "By transferring the data to the wavelet domain, applying re-sampling methods and then returning the re-sampled data as variants in the time domain, you can then proceed as if you had a data ensemble rather than a single run."

Vidakovic discussed his research on validating wavelet bootstrapping strategies and assessing their variability bounds at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle. His presentation "What Does a Single Run Tell about the Ensemble?" was part of a session "Wavelet-Based Statistical Analysis of Multiscale Geophysical Data" held on February 16.

"Sometimes scientists have a single measurement and they are unable to get another measurement," Vidakovic explained. "Sometimes they would like to have an ensemble of measurements with similar boundary conditions so the heterogeneity caused by external factors - such as different regimes, times of day or climate conditions - are taken into account. Wavestrapping can help make inferences from a single run."

One example might be a study of atmospheric turbulence in which an additional flight to gather data under similar conditions could be impossible. "Atmospheric scientists are very excited about wavelets because not only are they local and able to efficiently describe organized structures in turbulence, but they are also able to assess the self-similarity and scaling indices of turbulence," Vidakovic said.

In such instances, converting the data into a wavelet domain before re-sampling can produce information for which error bounds can be reliably assessed, Vidakovic said. Though the bootstrapping technique is controversial, he believes it offers important opportunities when used with appropriate data sets.

"This is very effective when data in the time domain are not good for bootstrapping because of dependency," he said. "It can solve one difficult problem, and in that respect it is new and exciting."

Wavestrapping was proposed and developed by Don Percival and other researchers at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab. Vidakovic's research, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, builds on that work in assessing the technique's validity and where its use is appropriate.

Some examples of wavestrapping applications include:

• Rapid analysis of changes in pupil diameter to reveal clues about the health of patients. Using measurements taken 21 times per second, Vidakovic is helping Georgia Tech researchers Julie Jacko and Francois Sainfort analyze data that may provide quick detection of specific medical conditions.
• Statistical study of new types of nanometer-scale materials. "Nano materials science is increasingly multiscale because people are looking at the problem at different scales," said Vidakovic. "The modeling should therefore be done at different scales because the materials are very different at the different scales."
• Analysis of genomic data, especially in the rapid determination of which genetic sequences are coding and which are not.
• Medical imaging, such as the detection of details in mammography data where small differences in calcification shapes are important to diagnosis.

Wavelets offer advantages over traditional statistical analysis techniques, including:

• Ability to remove noise from complex data sets;
• Sensitivity to the fractal nature and self-similarity of data;
• Ability to minimize correlation and time-dependency of data;
• Locality of the analysis and ability to handle multi-scale information; and
• Computational simplicity, which permits faster analysis.

Although the beginnings of wavelets can be traced back almost a century, their wide use began only about 15 years ago when new wavelet bases were discovered and their implementation was connected with fast-filtering computational procedures.

"The interest in wavelets is their speed and locality," said Vidakovic. "Locality is the most important, because many natural phenomena are non-stationary and very local. Wavelets are able to economically describe phenomena that are inhomogeneous. For some phenomena, it would be impossible to make sense of the data without wavelets."

Wavelets also help researchers with a major problem of the computer age - large volumes of data mixed with noise. "Their dimension reduction and ability to deal with huge data sets are also strengths of wavelets," he added. "Very nasty data can be de-noised almost in real-time by selecting a few of the important wavelet coefficients that can retain the main trend in the signal."

Many different wavelets exist, and selecting the right ones is a vital part of developing the new technique, Vidakovic said. "Wavelets are not a miracle tool for everything," he warned. "But if the data are amenable to wavelet analysis, then they can be very helpful."

A mathematician at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Prof. Cook is one of hundreds of researchers who, since the 1930s, have wracked their brains over the puzzle known as the traveling-salesman problem. It asks: What's the shortest itinerary a salesman can follow to visit all the stops on his route?

If our Willy Loman has to make only three or four stops, the optimal route is easy to figure out. But once he adds a few dozen, the number of possible sequences grows exponentially, and the computer time it would take to calculate every possibility grows into the decades. As a result, after three mathematicians solved the problem for 49 cities in 1954, it took until 1971 to solve it for only 15 more. But Prof. Cook and three colleagues broke the problem wide open in the 1990s, solving it for 13,509 cities in 1998 and for 24,978 a few weeks ago. That feat took 67 computer years. (You can see the optimal paths at www.math.princeton.edu/tsp/vlsi/index.html.)

While not even the busiest salesman has a route that big, the problem has become a boldface celebrity in the business world because all manner of practical problems involve the basic question, what is the best way to do something? Applications range from scheduling cable-TV service calls and routing parcel-delivery trucks to drilling holes in a circuit board, where you want to minimize how far the drill, like the salesman, must travel.

Faster computers are still not fast enough for this task, because such problems have zillions of possible combinations, notes Michael Trick of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. UPS, for one, has upward of 1,500 pick-up/delivery facilities and sorting centers. It would take millennia of computer hours to solve its routing problems using the traditional problem-solving methods. So, scientists in "operations research" (a hybrid of math, engineering and computer science) now are exploiting what Prof. Trick calls "profound insights into the mathematics of the problem." In other words, they're figuring out clever shortcuts the computers can take.

These insights take the form of algorithms, a sort of mathematical recipe. "We're developing algorithms that are 10,000 times faster than the ones we used 15 years ago," says Irv Lustig, an operations researcher at ILOG Inc., Mountain View, Calif. "Now we can say, given the data, here is the probably-best answer."

An algorithm he developed for ILOG, which sells algorithm-packed custom software, tackled the National Football League's 2004 schedule. He had to juggle 256 games among 32 teams, subject to multiple constraints. There had to be a nationally appealing game every Monday night and at least one must-see match-up every Sunday, for example, and he couldn't send a team on the road for weeks at a time.

Dr. Lustig's algorithm created thousands of schedules that fit these constraints in a fraction of the time it took by trial-and-error computing. Even better, it can tweak a schedule in less than a day if, say, the NFL decides that a Giants-Redskins game simply won't do for Week 8 (it's Week 2). In the past, making that change would produce a domino effect taking days to fix.

Many of the new algorithms emerged from advances in a relatively young field of math called linear programming. Despite its name, linear programming is not a kind of software-writing. Instead, it's a way to solve optimization problems. Among the most powerful algorithms in linear programming is one that could use some help from a branding consultant, but for now is called the "interior-point method."

Imagine that every possible solution to a problem is represented as a point on the surface of a million-faceted diamond. The best solution is the one at the top. The challenge is to reach it. Traditionally, you'd do that by climbing (mathematically) from point to higher point along the outside of the diamond. The interior-point method lets you zoom up the inside. Depending on the number of facets on the diamond, that may let you find the solution more quickly.

Thanks to abstruse breakthroughs like this, operations research (OR) has scored in more than the NFL. To eliminate backtracking and overlapping routes, Waste Management Inc. solved what you might call a traveling garbage-truck problem. Using an optimization algorithm to reroute its fleet, WMI eliminated 761 trucks, saved $91 million in annual operating costs and still hauled the trash on time.

So-called fractional-fleet services needed a similar mathematical rescue. These companies promise customers who own, say, one-quarter of a business jet that they can depart from anywhere within four hours. The easiest way to do that is to have a plane at every airport their customers use. But that is a good way to bleed cash. With operations research, Bombardier Flexjet was able to cut crew levels by 20%, while getting 10% more daily flights out of each of its aircraft.

Bombardier and WMI are among the finalists in a competition run by Informs, the professional group for operations research. The winner will be announced next week.

- You can e-mail me at sciencejournal@wsj.com.

A Georgia Tech alumnus and Atlanta-native, Kimbrough was named today as one of 11 astronauts tapped to be part of NASA's Astronaut Class of 2004. The astronauts will be NASA's first since President George Bush announced its new vision for space exploration in January.

"Once I finish my first year of astronaut training, I hope to be assigned to several technical jobs so I can improve myself, professionally,." he said. "But then I'd be thrilled to take on any space mission * even to the moon or Mars."

Kimbrough, 36, will serve as a mission specialist.

Kimbrough is an Army major and currently works for NASA as a flight simulation engineer on the Shuttle Training Aircraft at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Kimbrough graduated from Georgia Tech with a master's degree in Operations Research in 1998. He also graduated from The Lovett School in Atlanta.

As an Army pilot, he was trained to fly both airplanes and helicopters but was assigned to helicopters. He served in the Gulf War as a platoon leader.

Kimbrough also taught math at West Point, including calculus and statistics.

Though his career has been focused on serving his country, Kimbrough says the opportunity to serve as an astronaut fulfills a childhood dream.

"I have been fascinated by space travel since I was a kid. I want to explore the unknown," Kimbrough said.

Kimbrough and the other 10 candidates will report to NASA's Johnson Space Center this summer to begin their training.

Other candidates chosen to be included in NASA's astronaut class of 2004:

* Joe Acaba, a mission specialist-educator, 36, is a science and math teacher at Dunnellon Middle School in Dunnellon, Fla.

* Ricky Arnold II, mission specialist-educator, 41, is a science and math teacher at the American International School in Bucharest, Romania.

* Randy Bresnik, pilot, 36, is a Marine Corps major from the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, Calif., where he served as an operations officer and F/A-18 pilot.

* Chris Cassidy, mission specialist, 34, a Navy lieutenant commander, is an oceanographer.

* Jim Dutton, pilot, 35, is an Air Force major and F/A-22 test pilot based at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

* Jose Hernandez, mission specialist, 41, is an electrical engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

* Tom Mashburn, mission specialist, 43, is a flight surgeon at Johnson Space Center.

* Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, mission specialist-educator, 29, is a science teacher and coach at Fort Collins High School in Fort Collins, Colo.

* Bobby Satcher Jr., mission specialist, 38, is an assistant professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

* Shannon Walker, mission specialist, 38, is an engineer at Johnson Space Center.

Georgia Tech has a proud history in space exploration. Ten astronauts have earned degrees from Georgia Tech, another three graduates have been selected as candidates for future missions and another astronaut is a former Tech faculty member.

  More information can be found at the NASA website.

The unpredictability of internet traffic (sudden surges of shoppers or stockmarket trading; the ups and downs of an internet auction) gives firms which run servers quite a headache. To maximise their profit, they have to juggle their computers between different applications in order to adapt to changing levels of demand. Only one web-application can be loaded on to a computer at one time, and switching between applications incurs a penalty of five to seven minutes of downtime while the computer is reconfigured.

Honeybees have a similar problem. Patches of flowers vary in quality, so a colony needs to "decide" how many bees will forage at each patch and how long they will forage, in order to maximise the rate of nectar collection.

Millions of years of evolution have provided the bees with a pretty good solution. Around one-fifth of the bees in a hive are employed as nectar collectors. Their job is to zip back and forth to flower patches, gathering batches of nectar. On returning to the hive, they transfer their takings to one of the stay-at-home food-storer bees, who then stash it in a honeycomb.

A nectar-collecting bee judges how good its flower patch is, relative to the patches being visited by its hive-mates, by seeing how long it takes to find an unemployed food-storer bee. If it takes ages, then the forager concludes that its patch is nothing special, and that most of the other forager bees must have had successful runs, too. But if there is a plethora of food-storer bees ready to take the nectar, then the forager realises that it has struck lucky.

Using this information, the forager decides whether its flower patch is worthwhile. If so, it signals to others to follow it back by doing the famous waggle dance. The length of this dance indicates how profitable a flower patch is likely to be.

Dr Nakrani and Dr Tovey have exploited the honeybees' strategy and applied it to the problems of internet hosts. By comparing individual servers to foraging bees, and customer requests to flower patches, the two researchers have developed a "honeybee" algorithm for internet-server "hives". Instead of waggle-dancing, a server produces an "advert", which it sends to the other servers in the hive. The duration of this advert reflects the importance and profitability of that server's customers. Other servers that read the advert act like worker bees following a waggle dance-judging on the basis of the advert, and of their own recent experience, whether to switch from the customers they are currently serving to the new ones being served by the server that produced the advert.

Honeybees and internet servers share similar problems right down to the finest level of detail. For example, the downtime penalty incurred when a computer is switched from one web-application to another can be compared to the trade-off for a honeybee that is switching flower patches-an activity that usually requires several attempts before a profitable new patch is located.

To see whether their analogy is useful, Dr Nakrani and Dr Tovey tested the honeybee algorithm against the so-called greedy algorithm currently used as the basis for the allocation of servers by most internet host providers. A greedy algorithm is backward looking. It divides time into fixed periods and allocates servers to customers for a period by working out what would have been the most profitable arrangement in the preceding one.

When internet traffic was highly variable, the honeybee algorithm outperformed greedy by as much as 20%. If the traffic became more uniform, then the greedy algorithm began to outperform honeybee. However, most internet traffic is, indeed, highly variable. That suggests Dr Nakrani and Dr Tovey might be on to something. As is often the case with human inventions, nature got there first.

This year, ISyE teamed up with Hemophilia of Georgia (HoG) . Adopting the name Georgia Tech HOGS, the team had thirty-one members, a large increase over years past.

Participating from ISyE this year were Jane Ammons, Carmella Bell, Doug Bodner, Marcia Chandler, Trudy Cron, Sheila Devezin, Patti Parker, Lorraine Shaw and Yvonne Smith.

As part of the race activities, the team solicited donations for the Komen Foundation. All told, the team raised over $1,600 for breast cancer research.

View Additional Photos of the Event

Associate Professor Eva Lee uses mathematical optimization techniques originally developed for the industrial world to help doctors produce the best results from radiation therapy. Here, she holds an ultrasound image of a prostate (photo by Gary Meek).

To read the article in its entirety, please visit Georgia Tech's Research Horizons online.

The team consisted of Ph.D. students Abhyuday Mandal, Zhiguang Qian, and Andrew Smith. Smith was also honored as Individual Runner-up. Ten universities competed in Stat Bowl.

Mandal was the first to commit himself to the competition, at the invitation of Mark Payton, Stat Bowl's organizer from Oklahoma State University. He talked his roommate, Qian, into joining him. It wasn't a hard sell. "He told me if I participated I'd get a $500 reimbursement (for conference fees)," says Qian. All competitors received the reimbursement.

Smith was a last minute addition to the team when an extra slot opened up. "It was flattering for me," he says. "I came in there at the last minute. It was completely unexpected for me to play, let alone win something." Perhaps it was his attire; he competed in shorts and a t-shirt, while his competitors wore professional garb.

None of the Tech students cracked their books for the competition, which has two rounds. The first, or screening round, was a written quiz. "Basically a statistics quiz," says Mandal. "They asked different questions about history, current research, or people who have had an influence in the field." Those who made the cut got to come back for the Jeopardy-style buzzer round.

"It was a fun thing," continues Mandal. "Some of our faculty attended the final to give us support. The room was full, an audience of 60 or so." Team scores were determined by combining individual scores. The questions were by no means consistent in difficultly, ranging from the complicated to lightweights such as, "Where is next year's conference?" Qian got the right state, but struggled to name the city. He finally responded with the only city in Minnesota that he knew: Minneapolis. He was correct.

Mandal commented that winning "is an honor to the school and to us. We are very happy to get the trophy." Smith received a plaque for his individual efforts.

Stat Bowl, formerly known as College Bowl, was established in 1992 at the ASA Winter Conference in Louisville. Starting in 1994, it was conducted every year until 1999. After a gap of three years, it was successfully reincarnated at the 2003 JSM in San Francisco, with several enhancements.

The campus-wide Tennenbaum Institute, established with a $5 million gift from distinguished Georgia Tech alumnus Michael Tennenbaum, will help both private and public enterprises to keep up with * and lead * constant changes in technology and in the marketplace.

The Tennenbaum Institute's focus will be on understanding and supporting * via best practices, methods and tools * strategic and operational change to transform existing private and public enterprises to become more cost-effective and competitive. The institute will partner with academic, corporate and government sector organizations and experts to develop business practices and shape organizational cultures for sustained economic growth.

Rouse has more than thirty years of experience in research, education, management, marketing, and engineering related to individual and organizational performance, decision support systems and information systems. In these areas, he has consulted with more than 100 large and small enterprises in the private, public and non-profit sectors, where he has worked with several thousand executives and senior managers. He founded and led two software companies prior to his return to Georgia Tech in 2001. Rouse has served on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and, in visiting positions, on the faculties of Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and Tufts University. He received his B.S. from the University of Rhode Island, and his S.M. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The School of Industrial and Systems Engineering will form a search committee to identify a successor for Rouse, who will continue to serve as chair until this successor can assume the chair's position.

In a bioterror scenario such as this, the speed at which emergency health care facilities treat patients can mean the difference between life and death for thousands (or even millions) of people. And the logistics of such a large-scale emergency plan are dizzyingly complex.

But Eva Lee, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has created a computer program that is up to the task.

Based on a clinical model created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Lee developed the program, called RealOpt*, to help U.S. state, city and county healthcare departments organize the most efficient plan for treating infectious illness, whether it's a natural or man-made outbreak.

While government health departments have emergency plans in place, it is difficult to test a plan's efficiency against the urgency and sheer number of patients an outbreak would create. And when a severe outbreak of influenza starts to spread through the population, treatment facilities are faced with a number of problems as they attempt to treat or vaccinate many thousands of patients in just a few days.

How many doctors will be needed? How many nurses? How long will it take frightened or unprepared patients to fill out paperwork? How will infected patients be separated from healthy patients?

The CDC, recognizing that local public health departments needed guidance on what human resources would be required to treat the affected population, created a model that could assist in this effort. Then Lee, who is also an associate professor at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University, and her Georgia Tech team used the CDC model as a guide to build a new, more powerful program.

RealOpt can be used to prepare for a possible outbreak, as well as for emergency re-assignment of health care workers within the clinic and between clinics during an actual outbreak. By determining their preparedness, health departments will have a thorough estimate of what resources and funds they will need to treat their communities before an actual outbreak occurs.

The program takes the numerous variables associated with an emergency health care facility's treatment of a very large group of people, and through simulation and optimization, pinpoints the most efficient way to move patients through the facility. Using the program, a health care department can determine the most efficient facility layout, the number of health care professionals needed in certain areas, the number of vaccinations needed and the time it will take to treat patients.

In addition to its role in planning, one of RealOpt's significant advantages is its ability to process data in real time as the emergency treatment occurs. As patient flows fluctuate, the program can reallocate the facility's resources in a fraction of a second, sending more doctors or nurses to one station or more attendants to the paperwork processing area.

The program will be tested by health agencies in several states and was recently installed in Georgia. Installation is also scheduled for North Carolina. While the program is still in the testing phase, it will soon be available free to any government health department that requests it from Georgia Tech.

The next phase of the project, which is already underway, will expand the scope of the program to include an even more complex problem * how to quickly and efficiently get thousands or millions of patients to treatment facilities. The program will puzzle out the best locations to set up emergency treatment facilities based on roads and population density. These facilities can include anything from a school gymnasium to a football stadium.

This phase of the program is expected to be ready for testing in three to six months, Lee said, and a future phase will include simulations of the spread of infectious disease through the population and within treatment clinics.

The College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology is seeking nominations and applications from qualified individuals for the position of Chair of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The successful candidate will hold the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The School has an annual budget of $14.8M and is the largest industrial engineering program in the country. It has a student body of 928 undergraduate, 198 master's, and 197 Ph.D. students, and 58 full-time faculty members. The School's diverse faculty is actively engaged in research at the national and international level. Research program areas include optimization, manufacturing, logistics, stochastic systems, engineering economic decision analysis, engineering statistics, simulation, health systems, and human-integrated systems. Much of the research is done through centers such as the Manufacturing Research Center and The Logistics Institute (TLI). Innovative programs include The Executive Master's in International Logistics, TLI, and TLI Asia Pacific. The School has an endowment of $24.3M. A recent facilities expansion has more than doubled the School's total space to further support the various research efforts of students and faculty members. More information on the School can be found at www.isye.gatech.edu.

Candidates for this position must have an earned doctorate and national/international recognition in their specific discipline based on a proven record of excellence in academic and professional scholarly achievements. The successful candidate should have strategic skills and vision to lead the School toward higher levels of excellence within a multi-disciplinary and high-technology environment; be able to establish a successful working relationship with federal, state and private funding agencies; work with the faculty and Georgia Tech administration to raise funds from private and public sources; and maintain a close relationship with alumni of the School. The Chair reports to the Dean of the College of Engineering and is responsible for all administrative, budgetary and personnel decisions within the School. The successful candidate will be expected to provide evidence of fiscal responsibility and exhibit excellent leadership and management abilities, particularly interpersonal, team-building, and effective communication skills.

Nominations and applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Candidates should send a curriculum vitae and other supporting documentation including the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of five references to

Dr. Ward Winer, Chair, ISyE Chair Search Committee Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Mechanical Engineering Atlanta, GA 30332-0405
Tel: (404) 894-3200 Fax: (404) 894-1658
Email: ward.winer@me.gatech.edu

The Georgia Institute of Technology is a unit of the University System of the State of Georgia. Georgia Institute of Technology is an Equal Education/ Employment Opportunity Institution and encourages applications from and nominations of women and underrepresented minorities.

To pioneer the next step in enterprise transformation, Georgia Tech announced the creation of the Tennenbaum Institute, the first multi-disciplinary center of its kind, uniting academic, government and corporate experts to create industry-shaping business models. This approach demands a holistic view of industries and world markets to help companies remain competitive.

Established through a $5 million gift from Georgia Tech alumnus Michael Tennenbaum, the Tennenbaum Institute will address both private and public sector enterprises in areas such as aerospace, automotive, banking, computing, defense, education, health care, non-profits, pharmaceuticals, retail, telecommunications and transportation.

As a long-time veteran of Wall Street, Michael Tennenbaum has helped numerous ailing companies back from the brink of a crisis. Tennenbaum primarily invests in companies that are in desperate need of change, and he saw a need for a different approach to enterprise transformation * a need that a multidisciplinary initiative like the Tennenbaum Institute could fill.

"I think it's going to be a big success. It's a strong idea, and it's housed in a good spot," Tennenbaum said. "I think that education has gotten so specialized that there's a big opportunity to build more knowledge by combining different specialties, rather than just to keep drilling down deeper into one specialty."

The Tennenbaum Institute and its members will work together to research the interdisciplinary nature of enterprise transformation, identify and evaluate the best practices for accomplishing transformation and disseminate knowledge through publications (hardcopy and online), meetings (workshops and forums), education (graduate and executive) and outreach (extension services).

"The Tennenbaum Institute represents an opportunity for Georgia Tech to excel at multidisciplinary research and education in its broadest sense and consequently impact our understanding of major economic and social issues as well as contribute to these issues being addressed," said William Rouse, executive director of the Tennenbaum Institute and the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart chair of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

"Our job is not necessarily to solve a business or organization's problems today," he said. "Our job is to anticipate its emerging problems in a five year or so time horizon and to research the best ways of understanding and addressing those problems."

Dollar General Corp. will be the Institute's first corporate member and will bring its issues, concerns, knowledge and skills to the Tennenbaum Institute's exchange and debate.

This year's recipients are:

• Heidi Cerrud (Panama), Procurement Officer-Regional Logistics Unit International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
• Gabriella Toro (Venezuela), Lean Manufacturing Coordinator for Dana Venezuela
• Bublu Sarbani Thakur-Weigold (Germany), Supply Chain Management Consultant, Innovation Diffusion for Hewlett-Packard
• Alec Ang (Singapore), Supply Chain Logistics Director, Asia Pacific for DHL International

"It's truly an honor to be chosen for this opportunity," said Cerrud. "Through my participation in the EMIL Program, I expect to grow as a logistician, better enabling me to support Red Cross/Red Crescent's relief operations to disaster victims."

"The EMIL Scholarship winners have each demonstrated exceptional dedication and industry expertise over the course of their careers," said John Vande Vate, EMIL Executive Director. "It's this continued cross-pollination of professional expertise and international perspectives that makes EMIL the most unique logistics masters program in the world."

To qualify, scholarship applicants had to reside and do-business in Asia-Pacific, Latin America or Europe, as well as be admitted to EMIL as a degree-seeking student with program start date of at least February 2004. Scholarship applicants were required to have demonstrated career success, a clear potential for leadership and a desire to fully participate in EMIL's intense educational experience.

The 18-month masters program keeps employees on-the-job while teaching them practical techniques for decreasing logistics costs and improving supply chain efficiencies.

By Brian Albright, Frontline Solutions magazine

"The goal of the research is to create a means of testing diverse supply-chain strategies and operational tactics under different scenarios in order to discover which strategy is likely to achieve the best performance," says Terri Herod, managing director of the executive master's program. "Eventually, the simulation methodology developed could be integrated with rough-cut analytic tools for faster analysis and decision-making."
Intel supplied $30,000 worth of hardware in October to support the research. It's one of two new research projects taking place as part of the 4-year-old executive master's program; the other one is exploring solving problems around contract management issues.

The 18-month program in which students meet at different locations around the world in five two-week sessions draws students primarily from the VP and director level, with an average of 13 years of experience in the industry, many from Fortune 500 organizations. Heidi Cerrud, procurement officer at a Red Cross Regional Logistics Unit, is participating in the program. Cerrud is teamed with executives from Ability/Tri-Modal Transportation Services, Exel, Intel, and Intradeco on a global project related to using radio-frequency identification technology in the supply chain. What she's learning as part of the team's project could have implications for her work at the Red Cross, Cerrud says.

"This is a really useful project for the Red Cross. During a disaster, many things can happen to put shipments in peril. By using RFID technology to track our goods, we can avoid losing large shipments of cargo," Cerrud says. The Red Cross is working on a project using RFID, she says. "RFID is in the pre-implementation phase at the Red Cross, after which it is expected to be tested using an actual cargo shipment."

By Elena Malykhina, InformationWeek magazine

The EMIL program was instituted in 2000 at Georgia Tech's Industrial & Systems Engineering School as an international supply chain master's degree program designed to give executives skills to develop new solutions to improve supply chain efficiencies.

The program has drawn participants from industry, but also from the nonprofit and government sectors, to learn about the latest supply chain trends and technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID).

"Since emergency situations are often precarious, I need to be as educated as possible on supply chain and logistics processes," said Heidi Cerrud, current EMIL participant and procurement officer at a regional logistics unit for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

"Participating in the program has expanded my global network and helped me identify several potential alliance partners. Through these alliances and EMIL program content, the Red Cross is jump starting its new emergency operations strategies that utilize revenue management and RFID."

The program said it offers a "hands-on" learning environment where participants complete in-class assignments within the context of the current business environment, and also take part in a global project.

"It is the program participant's genuine interest in improving the supply chain and the cohesive work environment that make the EMIL program so attractive," said Dr. John Vande Vate, EMIL executive director. "When you bring together motivated executives from the world's leading organizations to learn and to problem-solve, the environment becomes intoxicating and the results are limitless."

The Chinese have a saying, "wu jí bì f?n," which translates roughly to "When the pendulum reaches one extreme, it must swing back the other way." Recently, the pendulum appears to be reaching an extreme on the issue of offshoring,
the practice of moving work to countries with low wage rates. And it will continue
as long as savings from lower wage rates outweigh the additional supply chain
costs engendered by the added time and distance to market. In many cases, companies
seem to be using offshoring beyond the point that makes economic sense.

Evidence of these excesses is most apparent in retailing, an industry that
represents 40% of the U.S. economy and is the nation's largest employer. For
example, Wal-Mart's "everyday low prices" have squeezed other retailers' margins
and driven them to seek lower initial costs, or first costs, from their suppliers.
As a result, over the past three decades the numbers of consumer goods imported
from distant, low-cost sources have grown substantially, which has helped to
drive the trade balance from around a $1 billion surplus in 1973 to a deficit
of $500 billion in 2003. Over the same period, markdowns at general merchandise
retail department stores have grown from single digits to over 30% of sales
today. Although lost sales from out-of-stock merchandise are harder to quantify,
it's reasonable to assume that such losses have grown similarly.

These numbers suggest that U.S. retailers and their suppliers have not adequately
balanced labor costs against other supply chain costs. Rather, they are concentrating
on trying to lower the first costs they pay for goods-an effort that is indirectly
hurting their profit margins.

The real question for retailers is not whether offshoring is ethically or
politically correct. Instead, they need to ask whether they are correctly balancing
the impact of offshoring on cost and revenue in making sourcing decisions

The Notion of Total Delivered Cost
By
relying on traditional notions of total delivered cost, retailers sometimes
fail to account for the impact that off-shore manufacturing has on revenues,
given extended time and distance to market. This impact is further magnified
by the phenomenon of SKU proliferation resulting from consumer demand for greater
product variety.

In its 1998 annual report, the Federal Reserve of Dallas estimated that the
number of running-shoe styles rose from about five in the early 1970s to about
285 in the late 1990s. The most astounding examples of SKU proliferation come
from manufacturers who use mass customization as a key market strategy. The
same Federal Reserve report estimated that Dell offered consumers more than
16 million combinations of computers, and BMW claims that it produces more
than 1017 variations of its 7 Series automobile.

The increased product variety makes forecasting more complex, if not impossible,
and also makes offshore manufacturing even more difficult to manage. BMW, for
example, is adept at forecasting overall demand for its 7 Series but could
not estimate sales for each of the 1017 different combinations. Instead, manufacturers
like Dell and BMW understand the cost implication of time to market and work
hard to shorten the order-to-delivery cycle through such strategies ad postponement.

Knowing When to Stay Home

The key to effective sourcing decisions relies on the manufacturer's ability
to balance longer lead time against lower first costs. Savvy supply chain management
can help retailers deal with margin squeeze and the demand for product variety
through a combination of strategies that may include, but is not limited to,
offshoring.

Two retailers are frequently cited for their success in sourcing for maximum
profitability: World Co. Ltd. of Japan and Zara, owned by Inditex and headquartered
in Spain. Both have maintained margins by developing their supply chains to
reduce lead times and trim the product cycle time from the six-months-out approach
of traditional fashion retailers to as short as six weeks.

At World Co., supply chain speed comes
from careful planning, information systems that permit continuous forecast
updating, and production processes that can respond rapidly to change. One
factor in the speed of this supply chain is the company's decision to maintain
domestic production. Although the cost of labor in domestic factories is
significantly higher than that of overseas counterparts, World Co. can respond
more quickly to the frequent changes of the fashion world.

In Europe, Zara has achieved similar success
by continuously tracking customer preferences so that it can revise products
throughout their life cycles. Zara offers considerably more products than
similar companies. It produces about 11,000 distinct items annually compared
with 2,000 to 4,000 items for its key competitors. The company can design
a new product and have finished goods in its stores in four to five weeks;
it can modify existing items in as little as two weeks. Shortening the product
life cycle means greater success in meeting consumer preferences.

Zara's speed is the result of a combination
of elements, including manufacturing its more fashion-sensitive items locally.
Because these are the riskiest items, they are also produced in smaller quantities
so that they can be reordered more frequently on the basis of sales. A full
40% of Zara's finished garments are manufactured in Spain, and two-thirds
of the remaining items are sourced from nearby European countries and North
Africa.

In the case of World and Zara, proximity
between manufacturing and retail outlets is important in achieving a competitive
advantage that translates into stronger profits. Still, outsourcing to a
more distant location can and does have a place in retailing, even in the
rarified world of high fashion.

Deciding by Demand

Sourcing decisions should reflect the uncertainty
in demand for the product. Higher volume items with predictable demand can be
sourced further from their outlets than lower volume, high-risk products.

In short, a pair of standard work boots
does not require the same design flexibility as a pair of Manolo Blahnik
sandals, nor does it command the same price point. It's the kind of item
that can be off-shored for maximum cost efficiency because style is not likely
to change markedly over time.

Splitting the Difference

Another approach to economic sourcing is to
segment the manufacturing process, sourcing basic production processes further
from the retailer and putting the finishing touches on products at locations
closer to their outlets.

For example, Li & Fung (which derives
75% of its turnover from the apparel industry) sets up and manages supply
chains for such clients as Kohl's, Reebok, Disney, and Meijer, in which a
single product is assembled from components sourced from several locations.
By creating flexible supply networks, these organizations can allow for this
kind of integrated sourcing, including the ability to redeploy raw materials
as needed and reduce lead times in response to market changes.

The Bottom Line

No one solution works in every situation.
Cutting first costs may look like a sure way to bolster margins, but the added
lead time often leaves too much or too little inventory, sacrificing profits
to markdowns or lost sales. As retailers increasingly share the cost of discounting
and overstocking, there is some hope that suppliers will do a better job of balancing
the cost/revenue tradeoff. But until retailers incorporate the value of speed
and proximity into their commercial terms, suppliers' options will remain limited.
For now, offshoring is but one in a portfolio of strategies for maintaining margin
and profitability. Perhaps as suppliers start to shoulder more of the costs of
discounting and overstocking, they will find ways to negotiate commercial terms
that better reflect the impact of time to market and help drive the pendulum
back toward balance.

You need only look at Wal-Mart and Tiffany & Co. to see that margin is neither the only -- nor the best -- yardstick for success. Wal-Mart stores have a margin of less than 4%, and Tiffany & Co. commands an 11% margin. But Wal-Mart's speed -- the revenue it can generate with each dollar of investment -- gives it the higher return on investment (ROI). Tiffany generates only $.96 per dollar of capital invested in its high-end merchandise and upscale stores, while Wal-Mart yields nearly $3.50 in revenue on the same dollar investment. So Wal-Mart's ROI is more than 13% compared with Tiffany's of less than 11%. The reason? Speed. Wal-Mart is simply faster at in turning dollars invested into dollars in revenue.

Speed is even more important than margin for companies that want to capitalize on emerging markets, where margin often must be sacrificed because consumers have less discretionary income and are price sensitive. Yet just because the margin is low doesn't mean that opportunity isn't there. Consider the fact that Colgate sells roughly a billion toothbrushes in China each year, and Unilever sells more than $8 billion of brand-name consumer products in Africa, Turkey, the Middle East, and Latin America.

To create effective strategies for increasing speed, you first have to break down and understand the elements of speed by focusing on components of the capital invested. While supply chain executives do have influence on the capital tied up in good will, property, and plant and equipment, they are primarily responsible for the capital tied up by operations. In particular, supply chain activities influence the cash-to-cash cycle-the time elapsed from when a company pays for raw materials until it collects revenues from the sale of those materials as finished goods.

Supply chain activities that improve order and invoice accuracy, for example, do influence receivables, but generally credit terms on sales and purchases are related more to financial arrangements than to operations. On the other hand, supply chain activities directly influence the time it takes to transform raw materials into delivered finished goods -- a factor represented by the inventory component of the cash-to-cash cycle.

One company doing an excellent job of reducing raw materials inventories is Nokia.

Nokia has reduced raw material inventory through such efficiencies as its global supply web linking Nokia suppliers and plants. This system enables the company to stay in close contact with suppliers and logistics service providers for demand forecasting and order management and tracking. Although Nokia insists that suppliers own component inventory until it is used, the company also supports vendor-managed inventory, which allows the vendor to determine how much inventory is kept on site. And Nokia tracks inventories not only for its own operations but for its suppliers as well. In addition, Nokia uses a single logistics service provider to coordinate all the in-bound transportation to each manufacturing site so that the company can consolidate shipments and exploit economies of scale. The result is a flexible and responsive environment where speed is achieved by reducing days of raw material inventory.

The Toyota manufacturing system operates in a similar manner, but with the added element of small, frequent deliveries. In fact, Toyota assembly plants hold only about four hours worth of component supplies. These are replenished every 37 minutes or so from a cross-docking operation that loads the trucks not with individual parts but with complete car sets -- just enough for the next 37 minutes of production. This strategy has the double advantage of keeping raw material inventories low and of mitigating the risks of supply interruptions. If something happens to one or even a few trucks, the plant can continue to operate smoothly until the next vehicle arrives.

When it comes to work-in-process inventory--transforming raw materials on hand into finished goods--two examples come to mind: Northrop Grumman and Samsung. What makes them even more interesting is that they represent extreme ends of the spectrum.

Northrop Grumman participated in the Lean Aerospace Initiative and launched its own Lean Enterprise Initiative to apply Toyota's method for manufacturing automobiles to the much more complex defense industry (an automobile has about 4000 components compared with the hundreds of thousands of components of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, like those Northrop Grumman builds). By implementing a traditional lean production approach, the company was able to reduce throughput time for major systems by 21% to 42%. And they didn't stop there. Northrop also implemented a Supplier Lean Initiative to help its vendors benefit as well.

Beyond the obvious differences in the scale of their products, Samsung differs from Northrop Grumman in that manufacturing in the semiconductor industry is not linear. Wafers return again and again to the same equipment as the different layers of the product are added. Samsung has applied the Theory of Constraints, which focuses on identifying and managing bottleneck processes. It realized that keeping equipment use high on non-bottleneck processes simply produces more inventory, not greater value. So Samsung makes sure that all of the other operations in the process keep pace with the bottleneck.

Finally, speed can be achieved by accelerating the movement of finished goods to the customer. When forecasts are poor and supply doesn't match demand, companies are faced with the unpleasant options of turning the excess goods into scrap or selling at deep discounts, which erodes profits. The goal is to have supply match demand in ways that enhance rather than erode profits.

General Motors is aggressively reducing its order-to-delivery cycle through the way it builds its vehicles. Its objective is to sell the vehicles people want, when they want them, and at full price. The company has focused on reducing the queue of orders waiting to be built, and rescheduling production so that customer orders are moved to the front of the line. In the process, GM has reduced its order-to-delivery window from roughly 80 days in 1999 to between 20 to 30 days today.

That's absolutely critical in an industry where BMW is closing in on a 10-day order-to-delivery capability. In the past, BMW was a build-to-order operation. Production didn't begin until there was an order. Today, the company builds painted bodies for stock and pulls from that stock to build vehicles to order. This simplifies the manufacturing process and, most importantly, shortens the order-to-delivery window.

The ability of companies to increase speed, especially by reducing days in inventory, pays off in their overall success as much if not more than increasing margins. And that can help attract investor dollars for the future. Some of the companies we have mentioned in this article provide compelling examples. Compare Samsung's 406% total shareholder return from January 1, 2000, to January 1, 2004, with that of its competitors Sony (total shareholder return 0%) and Micron (total shareholder return -46%).

Of course, there are other factors at work as well. The fact that Siemens AG enjoyed a 76% total shareholder return from January 1, 2000, to January 1, 2004, compared with Nokia's 10%, Motorola's -96%, and Ericsson's -69% may have more to do with currency and diversification issues than with supply chain performance. Similarly, the fact that Northrop Grumman stock performance has been poor compared with its competitors over the past four years probably has more to do with the $19 billion in good will the company carries on its balance sheet from some ill-timed acquisitions. But while stock performance and total shareholder return depend on many aspects beyond speed and margin, speed is the most direct way supply chain executives can influence them. You can't fix everything, but you can fix speed.

Margin has long been a key measure of how well a business is doing, and an increase
in margin has been seen as the route to success. But focusing on margin alone
may prevent companies from tapping into one of the most powerful opportunities
to improve their performance: speed. Speed can turn even low margin products
into big business.

You need only look at Wal-Mart and Tiffany & Co. to see that margin is
neither the only -- nor the best -- yardstick for success. Wal-Mart stores
have a margin of less than 4%, and Tiffany & Co. commands an 11% margin.
But Wal-Mart's speed -- the revenue it can generate with each dollar of investment
-- gives it the higher return on investment (ROI). Tiffany generates only $.96
per dollar of capital invested in its high-end merchandise and upscale stores,
while Wal-Mart yields nearly $3.50 in revenue on the same dollar investment.
So Wal-Mart's ROI is more than 13% compared with Tiffany's of less than 11%.
The reason? Speed. Wal-Mart is simply faster at in turning dollars invested
into dollars in revenue.

Speed is even more important than margin for companies that want to capitalize
on emerging markets, where margin often must be sacrificed because consumers
have less discretionary income and are price sensitive. Yet just because the
margin is low doesn't mean that opportunity isn't there. Consider the fact
that Colgate sells roughly a billion toothbrushes in China each year, and Unilever
sells more than $8 billion of brand-name consumer products in Africa, Turkey,
the Middle East, and Latin America.

To create effective strategies for increasing speed, you first have to break
down and understand the elements of speed by focusing on components of the
capital invested. While supply chain executives do have influence on the capital
tied up in good will, property, and plant and equipment, they are primarily
responsible for the capital tied up by operations. In particular, supply chain
activities influence the cash-to-cash cycle-the time elapsed from when a company
pays for raw materials until it collects revenues from the sale of those materials
as finished goods.

Supply chain activities that improve order and invoice accuracy, for example,
do influence receivables, but generally credit terms on sales and purchases
are related more to financial arrangements than to operations. On the other
hand, supply chain activities directly influence the time it takes to transform
raw materials into delivered finished goods -- a factor represented by the
inventory component of the cash-to-cash cycle.

One company doing an excellent job of reducing raw materials inventories is
Nokia.

Nokia has reduced raw material inventory through such efficiencies as its global
supply web linking Nokia suppliers and plants. This system enables the company
to stay in close contact with suppliers and logistics service providers for
demand forecasting and order management and tracking. Although Nokia insists
that suppliers own component inventory until it is used, the company also
supports vendor-managed inventory, which allows the vendor to determine how
much inventory is kept on site. And Nokia tracks inventories not only for
its own operations but for its suppliers as well. In addition, Nokia uses
a single logistics service provider to coordinate all the in-bound transportation
to each manufacturing site so that the company can consolidate shipments
and exploit economies of scale. The result is a flexible and responsive environment
where speed is achieved by reducing days of raw material inventory.

The Toyota manufacturing system operates in a similar manner, but with the
added element of small, frequent deliveries. In fact, Toyota assembly plants
hold only about four hours worth of component supplies. These are replenished
every 37 minutes or so from a cross-docking operation that loads the trucks
not with individual parts but with complete car sets -- just enough for the
next 37 minutes of production. This strategy has the double advantage of keeping
raw material inventories low and of mitigating the risks of supply interruptions.
If something happens to one or even a few trucks, the plant can continue to
operate smoothly until the next vehicle arrives.

When it comes to work-in-process inventory--transforming raw materials on
hand into finished goods--two examples come to mind: Northrop Grumman and Samsung.
What makes them even more interesting is that they represent extreme ends of
the spectrum.

Northrop Grumman participated in the Lean Aerospace Initiative and launched
its own Lean Enterprise Initiative to apply Toyota's method for manufacturing
automobiles to the much more complex defense industry (an automobile has about
4000 components compared with the hundreds of thousands of components of a
nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, like those Northrop Grumman builds). By implementing
a traditional lean production approach, the company was able to reduce throughput
time for major systems by 21% to 42%. And they didn't stop there. Northrop
also implemented a Supplier Lean Initiative to help its vendors benefit as
well.

Beyond the obvious differences in the scale of their products, Samsung differs
from Northrop Grumman in that manufacturing in the semiconductor industry is
not linear. Wafers return again and again to the same equipment as the different
layers of the product are added. Samsung has applied the Theory of Constraints,
which focuses on identifying and managing bottleneck processes. It realized
that keeping equipment use high on non-bottleneck processes simply produces
more inventory, not greater value. So Samsung makes sure that all of the other
operations in the process keep pace with the bottleneck.

Finally, speed can be achieved by accelerating the movement of finished goods
to the customer. When forecasts are poor and supply doesn't match demand, companies
are faced with the unpleasant options of turning the excess goods into scrap
or selling at deep discounts, which erodes profits. The goal is to have supply
match demand in ways that enhance rather than erode profits.

General Motors is aggressively reducing its order-to-delivery cycle through
the way it builds its vehicles. Its objective is to sell the vehicles people
want, when they want them, and at full price. The company has focused on reducing
the queue of orders waiting to be built, and rescheduling production so that
customer orders are moved to the front of the line. In the process, GM has
reduced its order-to-delivery window from roughly 80 days in 1999 to between
20 to 30 days today.

That's absolutely critical in an industry where BMW is closing in on a 10-day
order-to-delivery capability. In the past, BMW was a build-to-order operation.
Production didn't begin until there was an order. Today, the company builds
painted bodies for stock and pulls from that stock to build vehicles to order.
This simplifies the manufacturing process and, most importantly, shortens the
order-to-delivery window.

The ability of companies to increase speed, especially by reducing days in
inventory, pays off in their overall success as much if not more than increasing
margins. And that can help attract investor dollars for the future. Some of
the companies we have mentioned in this article provide compelling examples.
Compare Samsung's 406% total shareholder return from January 1, 2000, to January
1, 2004, with that of its competitors Sony (total shareholder return 0%) and
Micron (total shareholder return -46%).

Of course, there are other factors at work as well. The fact that Siemens
AG enjoyed a 76% total shareholder return from January 1, 2000, to January
1, 2004, compared with Nokia's 10%, Motorola's -96%, and Ericsson's -69% may
have more to do with currency and diversification issues than with supply chain
performance. Similarly, the fact that Northrop Grumman stock performance has
been poor compared with its competitors over the past four years probably has
more to do with the $19 billion in good will the company carries on its balance
sheet from some ill-timed acquisitions. But while stock performance and total
shareholder return depend on many aspects beyond speed and margin, speed is
the most direct way supply chain executives can influence them. You can't fix
everything, but you can fix speed.

For some executives, a professional certification program is all they need, but for many, a full-fledged graduate degree program is appropriate. And executives now have numerous programs to choose from.

Terri Herod, managing director for Georgia Tech's Executive Master's in International Logistics, offers these 10 tips — based on input from supply chain professionals — for selecting a graduate program.

1. Decide what you want. If you are new to logistics, or are taking on new responsibilities, a quick, two- to five-day program, or a short-term professional certification may be all you need. These programs offer in-depth coverage of a specific supply chain topic. For professionals who seek 18- to 24-month programs in logistics, a good variety offering traditional Master's of Science degrees are available.
2. Make sure the program format fits your schedule. Working full-time and pursuing a graduate degree can be challenging. Be sure to find a program that accommodates your busy schedule. Some programs let you take classes on weekends, or within intensive, week-long residence sessions. Don't let geography limit your options. By including a combination of classroom, distance learning, and group projects, a master's degree program can help you mitigate any interruptions to your work and home life.
3. Determine how an executive masters degree will advance your career. Your executive education should directly benefit your career, for example, garnering an increase in salary, or a move into management upon graduation. If you have your sights set on a particular career path, be sure this degree will help you achieve your objectives. Check with your company's human resources department to determine how a master's degree will impact your internal career opportunities. Invest your time in a program that will be a business and personal differentiator.
4. Choose a top-ranked school with a good reputation. Many executive education programs are available today. Learn from the best. What gets noticed on your resume is a top-ranked university with a good reputation in the field. Check out the quality of the school and its program stakeholders - instructors, presenters, and curriculum advisory board. These team members will greatly shape your experience.
5. Review the curriculum. Look for a well-rounded curriculum that fits your long-term career objectives. The curriculum should target the executive level, and provide you with the knowledge and tools for better decision-making. Choose a program that allows you to master a globally extended supply chain, and translate it into a financial and/or business context.
6. Ensure relevance to the real world and your job. Make sure the program extends beyond the discussion of theories, and requires the application of strategies and principles that can quickly impact real-life organizations. Your executive master's program should combine classroom and real-world corporate interaction that will help make business decisions. Beyond the rigors of analytical solutions, the program should give you exposure to executives at other companies, have ample group projects, utilize case studies, and allow you to bring real-world problems from the marketplace into the classroom.
7. Examine the class makeup. Networking and learning from your peers is an often overlooked but valuable component of your executive education experience. Look for a program whose participants have at least five years of experience, and are preferably higher-level executives. The program participants should come from different industries and countries, and have a variety of supply chain knowledge, giving you the advantage of different perspectives.
8. Interview alumni. The program's alumni are the best source for finding out what your executive experience will be like. Not only will this give you firsthand information, it will also offer additional insight into the class participants. Ask the program director if you can talk to a few alumni members. Speak with someone who comes from your industry, and someone in an unrelated industry. This provides the best opportunity to ask the tough questions and get unbiased answers.
9. See if other opportunities to collaborate with the university exist. Universities can be a great resource for you and your company. Not only can you recruit interns and employees, but you can also sponsor faculty guest lecturers at your company, and participate in research projects and executive level forums. Do you come across business strategies or issues that need in-depth analysis? You can often utilize university students to build models and employ analytical tools to solve these problems. Find out how the university you will attend collaborates with its business partners.
10. Examine the strength of the alumni network. After you graduate, the alumni network enables you to stay connected to other ambitious, resourceful, industry professionals. As new business challenges arise in your career, you don't have to reinvent the wheel; you can call on these resources for input and insights to help you out. Be sure the university has a strong program that allows you to continue learning from your alumni network.

General Motors recently waded into battle with its workers in Europe, specifically
in Germany-a struggle that, on the surface, looks much like the "life-or-death" battle
between VW and its German workforce. The differences between these two companies'
approaches highlight the differences between the European and U.S business
environments. At the heart of these differences is the fact that companies
in Europe are more formally and deeply integrated into the social fabric of
their countries. As a consequence, they view labor more as a fixed cost than
do their United States counterparts.

But European labor relations are now evolving in response to two major influences.
One is European integration. The other is increased wage competition not only
from China and India but also from such new European Union (EU) member countries
as Poland and Slovenia and EU candidates Romania and Bulgaria. In the European
auto industry, Japanese imports are mounting competition of the sort experienced
in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.

Businesses in the United States may learn some lessons from watching Europeans
address these changes. But both Europe and the United States already agree
that the buzzword of the day is "collaboration," the sharing of risks and returns
with supply chain partners. It only makes sense, then, to collaborate with
your closest and most important business partner: your workforce.

One way to collaborate is to improve workforce morale and productivity by
lifting some of the employment risk from workers' shoulders. How businesses
approach this collaboration may hold the key to success. GM and VW's current
struggles with their European workforces offer an excellent illustration.

GM to Cut Jobs

GM employs 63,000 people and operates 11 plants in 8 countries in Europe, including
multiple Opel plants in Germany, a Saab plant in Sweden, and a Vauxhall plant
in the United Kingdom. These operations have posted losses each year since
1999, and GM's share of the European auto market has dropped a full percentage
point to 9.2% since 2001. This past October, GM announced that it would cut
12,000 jobs over the next two years-nearly 20% of its European workforce-with
most of the cuts coming in Germany in 2005.

Opel Workers Fight Layoffs. Workers at the oldest Opel plant in Bochum,
Germany, the likely target for more than a third of these cuts, walked off
the job demanding that the company rule out compulsory layoffs. Despite the
urgings of Opel management, union leaders, and local and national politicians,
these workers continued their strike for six days until members of the works
council convinced them to return to the job.

Restructuring: Battling for Worker Buy-In. But getting the Opel workers
back on the job doesn't mean that GM's labor challenges are over. Under German
law, the company must come to an agreement with Opel workers before it can
implement its cost-cutting plan. Klaus Franz, head of the general works council
at Opel, stated, "We have two major targets-the first is no plant closures,
the second is no forced redundancies."

Franz proposed three directions for further discussions. First, he indicated
that GM management would need to participate in the belt tightening. Any savings
plan would have to include executive pay cuts of "much more" than the benchmark
10% that Mercedes-Benz executives agreed to in a resolution with their workforce
back in July.

Second, Franz noted that while the workforce at Opel's main Rüsselsheim
facility had fallen to 5,600 from 18,000 workers over the past 15 years, the
size of GM Europe's managerial workforce has gone "in a different direction" over
the same period. To facilitate reductions in management, he proposed that the
company revise its European restructuring, which had brought its three European
operations under one regional manager based in Zürich-outside the European
Union. Franz proposed that GM substitute the newly created "European Corporation" or "Société Européene" structure
and operate out of Brussels instead of Zürich.

Third, Franz observed that becoming a European company would significantly
simplify GM's legal structure. It could combine its 100 legal European entities
under one set of rules and a unified management and reporting system. This
structure would also allow European labor unions to negotiate directly with
GM management in Detroit.

VW to Reduce Labor Costs

VW employs more than 320,000 people worldwide, 176,000 of them in Germany.
Discounting by competitors and the strength of the Euro slashed VW's operating
profits by 47%, from 4.7 billion Euros in 2002 to about 2.5 billion Euros
in 2003, and its share price has fallen 21% this year. Consequently, the
company has stated the goal of reducing labor costs by 30% over the next
7 years.

A Different Labor Relations Model. In contrast to GM, VW's shareholder
structure dictates a distinctly different approach to labor relations. The
state of Lower Saxony, where VW is headquartered, holds 18.2% of Volkswagen
ordinary share stock and controls two seats on the company's supervisory board.
In fact, Gerhardt Schroeder, the German Chancellor, was a member of the VW
supervisory board when he was governor of the region. It's as if George W.
Bush and Jennifer Granholm, the Governor of Michigan, held seats on GM's board
and controlled 20% of the company's shares.

As inconceivable as that scenario would be in the United States, it is not
unusual in Europe. (And that helps explain why the German press felt justified
in leveling what I consider a ridiculous charge: that the GM shift of jobs
from Germany to Poland was politically motivated because of the two countries'
different responses to the war in Iraq.) The German system reserves half of
the supervisory board seats for union representatives, so management is aware
of the realities of downsizing in Germany and knows very well that workers
must agree to any restructuring plans.

Long-Term, Collaborative Change. In contrast to GM, VW's goals are
long-term and include no explicit statement about job cuts. Given its roots
in the European system, the company recognizes that it will have to collaborate
with its employees to determine just how it will realize the necessary savings.

Accordingly, although VW is no stranger to reductions in labor costs, these
reductions have typically come in the form of concessions on wages and hours
rather than layoffs. For example, after a $1.3 billion loss in 1993, the company
and the union agreed to forego planned raises in exchange for cutting back
to a four-day workweek, a move that reduced wages by 20% over the contract
period.

Leveraging Wage Differences. In dealing with unions, VW has also been
able to leverage the stark differences between the 30 Euros/hour (nearly $40/hour)
average wage for autoworkers in Germany and the 6 Euros/hour the company pays
its workers in Slovakia. In 2000, VW announced that its upscale sport-utility
vehicle, the Touareg, would be built in Bratislava, Slovakia. VW personnel
chief Peter Hartz observed, "For every car VW makes, the plants have to apply
to get the assignment. If Wolfsburg [Germany] wants to get a new model, it
must make an offer" that is competitive with VW plants in Spain, Mexico, Slovakia,
and elsewhere.

VW's Toran, a compact minivan, offers another example. To win production of
that vehicle for the VW plant in Wolfsburg, union representatives offered flexibility
in working hours and a commitment to repair defects in vehicles off the assembly
line with unpaid hours.

The Outlook for European Workers

Things are changing rapidly for the Europeans in several significant ways.
For one thing, Europe's expansion eastward has added to the European Union
10 countries with significantly lower labor costs. For another, the emergence
of China and India as sources of inexpensive goods and destinations for manufacturing
and service jobs is having a significant impact. In fact, imports from China
have grown significantly faster in old Europe than in the United States in
recent years. In addition,

These pressures (and others) mean that whatever the results of the GM and
VW negotiations with their workforces, labor in Europe faces challenges that
are likely to bring dramatic changes in the coming years.

Old Europe No Longer the Center. The new European Union members and
candidate countries have shifted the center of Europe eastward-not only geographically
and demographically but also economically. The GDP growth in Poland, the Czech
Republic, and Hungary was close to 3% in 2003 compared with 0.7% in Western
Europe. The eastward shift is philosophical as well. As Eastern Europe rebuilds
its labor market structure, it appears that it will more closely resemble the
Anglo-American structure than the European model.

High Wages or Plenty of Work? As VW's situation illustrates, wage differences
are a powerful lever for gaining concessions from labor leaders. France offers
another good example. The country's transport union negotiated more restrictive
hours of service rules for their workers than those imposed from Brussels.
This agreement applies only to French companies, however, and it proved to
be the "last straw," the one that drove many French transport operators to
relocate to places like the Czech Republic or Romania, where driver wages are
significantly lower. As a result, France lost about 15% of its trucking industry.

Losing Traditional Protections. In Western Europe, integration is untangling
the political involvements that have protected European laborers in the past.
The European Commission has taken Germany to court over the 44-year-old "Volkswagen
law," which gives Lower Saxony undue control over the carmaker by allowing
it to use its two seats on the supervisory board to block many company decisions.

At the same time, larger European companies are now listing on U.S. stock
exchanges, which means that they must reveal their margins and profitability
to shareholders quarterly. So such tactics as layoffs of workers in other countries
to compensate for falling revenues in Europe will be harder to justify or disguise.

Facing Growing Threats from Asia. The auto industry is also facing
increasingly serious threats from Asian competition. Although Asian carmakers
command only 17.4% of the European auto market compared with their 25% share
in the United States, they are gaining share rapidly. September sales figures,
for example, showed that while total European auto sales declined slightly,
Toyota sales in Europe increased 2.3%, and Honda, Hyundai, and Mazda posted
gains of 12% to 30%. Europeans are just beginning to feel the pain of Asian
competition because European Union trade policies had kept the Japanese car
makers out with a complex quota system. That system was dropped at the end
of 1999.

Along with the other changes we've looked at, this Asian competition has brought
tougher times for European Union workers. Lehman Equity strategists note a
3% reduction in total payroll costs for publicly traded companies across Europe.
And the transformation is just beginning. VW currently employs nearly 30% more
people than Toyota worldwide even though it produces 10% fewer vehicles. That
kind of labor expense just won't survive in the global marketplace.

Lessons for U.S. Employers

European employment structures are distinctly different from those in the United
States, and they will remain so. Still, in an international environment,
we can't ignore what is happening there. Although it would be presumptuous
to judge GM's strategy from this distance, the company's recent tussle with
its European workers will probably speed VW on its path to labor reductions
and certainly created enmity within GM. Strong medicine may be needed to
fix the profitability problems in Europe, but recreating the confrontational
labor-management relationships typical in the United States-antithetical
to principles of lean business structures and kaizen (the Japanese philosophy
of advocating continuous improvement in both personal and professional life)-is
not the right prescription.

Instead, collaborative relationships with employees may prove the most effective
and profitable. For example, in 1998, Frank Russell Co. discovered that investing
in the public companies on Fortune's list of the 100 best companies to work
for and then reinvesting in the new list each year, earned 10.6% annually compared
with the S&P 500's 5.7% annual return over the same period.

Perhaps the Old World can offer some new lessons on how to profitably collaborate
with your closest supply chain partner: your workforce.