Two teams of Anderson School of Management (ASM) graduate students took top honors at the regional level of the Donald W. Fogerty International Student Paper competition recently. The students, Erica Lopez, Tracy Maestas, Stephanie Jones and Tony Luddeke, were sponsored by the Albuquerque Chapter of APICS, an international professional membership organization founded in 1957 that is respected throughout the world for its education and professional certification programs.
Region 6 winners
1st place: Lopez and Maestas – Applying the Theory of Constraints Thinking Process Tools to Raysteel, Inc.
2nd place: Jones and Lueddeke – Applying Theory of Constraints Thinking Process Tools to a Semiconductor Research Facility at a National Laboratory
Sponsored by the APICS Education & Research Foundation, the International Student Paper competition is designed to encourage professional development of full time students interested in operations management. Donald W. Fogarty is an educator and author of several books on Operations Management.
The competition included graduate and undergraduate students majoring in operations management. UNM’s honorees competed at graduate level. Professor Richard Reid, who has served as student liaison for ASM for several years, guided the students.
“The papers were the results of a semester project where they applied the concepts and logic tools embodied in the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to a local organization,” said Reid.
“The idea is to help these organization’s improve their performance by understanding their current problems and work environment, determine the root cause or core conflict responsible for the majority of these undesirable effects, and develop and implement a plan to eliminate the cause (often a policy or managerial paradigm/mindset) responsible for the majority of the identified problems.”
The structured logic techniques expose conflicting business assumptions and provide an analytical approach to identifying new strategies. The teams did an extensive analysis of the study organizational situation using cause-effect logic, propose and validate their solutions through detailed “if… then…” logic diagrams, design plans to implement the solution/improvements by identifying and showing how to overcome organizational obstacles to changes required by the solution/improvements said Reid.
The judging criteria for the papers includes: relevance of topic to resource management (focus of APICS); timeliness of topic and material presented; apparent understanding of the topic and depth of coverage; accuracy of material; organization and clarity of presentation; and originality of treatment.
The paper written by the first place team in each of the 14 regions automatically goes forward for consideration in the international Fogarty competition whose winner will be announced in late October.
The APICS community is composed of nearly 60,000 individuals from 20,000 companies worldwide-across all segments of manufacturing, service, retail, and wholesale industries. APICS members hold titles from production and inventory manager and director of global supply chain to vice president of operations and chief financial officer.
APICS manages U.S. memberships in 14 regions. Region 6 includes Texas, Western Louisiana, New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Mexico.
Contact: Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821
Posted by scarr at September 1, 2004 01:19 PM