Global Supply Management Concentration Electives
Two (2) additional electives courses can be taken from any of the above cluster courses and/or from the following list of other related GSCM Concentration electives:
This course focuses on customer relationship strategy where the philosophy is to view customers as assets of the firm and the goal is to use customer information to build customer loyalty and relationships. This involves, in part, applying differential attention to more valuable customers with the goal of improving customer satisfaction while optimizing the current and future value of the customer base. The course will focus primarily on firms in ‘data-rich’ environments – that is, firms with detailed data on individual customers and firms with many customers.
Built around the notion of the customer lifecycle, the course emphasizes strategic initiatives in customer relationship management including identifying good prospects and customer acquisition; customer development through up-selling, cross-selling and personalization; customer attrition and retention; and winback. Topics covered include customer loyalty and loyalty programs, customer economics including customer profitability and lifetime value, as well as ethical issues raised by the use of individual customer data.
The course will also provide an introduction – including the advantages, limitations, common uses and some best practice examples – to commonly used marketing analytic tools and techniques. These include decile analysis, RFM (recency/frequency/monetary) analysis, and predictive models using logistic regression, and some data mining tools (e.g. classification trees such as CHAID).
In today’s technology enabled world, organizations collect lot of information as a part of their business operations and pool it with data acquired from outside sources. Marketing Analytics is a systematic approach to harnessing this data/ information to drive effective marketing decision making. We will learn to analyze historical data, market research data, and competitive information for making strategic marketing decisions.
This course will be extensively based on case analysis and hands on exercises. The cases and exercises used in course will be bundled with data files which will be used for detailed data analysis. The decision making for case problems will be based on insights that you will generate from these analyses. Other pedagogical tools that will be used are lectures, in class discussions, readings, and team assignments.
The objective of this course is to supplement basic marketing and marketing strategy courses by focusing on problems and strategies specific to marketing of services. Problems commonly encountered in marketing services -- such as inability to inventory, difficulty in synchronizing demand and supply, difficulty in controlling quality -- will be addressed. Strategies used by successful services marketers to overcome these difficulties will be discussed.
The emphasis in the course will be on service universals rather than on any particular industry (such as bank marketing). However, concepts will be illustrated using cases, examples, and exercises in service industries such as banking, health care, financial planning, consulting, the professions, and communication as well as manufacturing and high tech industries (both of which depend heavily on services to provide value).
The course is designed not just for students with careers in services industries but also careers in goods industries with high service components (e.g., industrial products, high tech products, durable products).
MBA 796 develops the foundation for financial decisions in a global economic environment. The course extends the analytical concepts and tools that you learned in introductory investment and corporate finance courses to multi-country/multi-currency settings. We will concentrate on three areas: the economics of exchange rates, international capital markets, and international corporate finance. The course is designed to mimic the activities and decisions made by managers of multinational corporations (MNC); that is, we will address the management of foreign- exchange exposures, the opportunities for investing and financing in the global debt and equity markets, and the valuation of international investment projects. The topics covered in this course are increasingly relevant, as corporations (your future employers!) continue to expand internationally.
This course examines the origins, evolution, and current schools of thought around sustainable development. Study and discussion of sustainability as a theory of industrial development and accompanying models of commerce provides a context for understanding current models of business and its effects on other systems. The course also focuses on strategy, leadership, and innovation as applied to the Sustainable Enterprise. Through example as well as application of management theory, we will examine how today’s leaders are creating programs of transformation for competition in the “next” generation of industry and commerce.
The objective of this course is to improve your skills as negotiators. You will gain a broad intellectual understanding of the concepts that are central to negotiation, and develop a toolkit of useful negotiation skills, strategies, and approaches. Topics covered include distributive negotiations, integrative negotiations, negotiating through agents/third parties, the dynamics of group-based negotiations and dispute resolution. Through hands-on, in-class activities, you will be challenged to think creatively, and to develop confidence in using the negotiation process as an effective means for deal-making and for resolving conflicts.
This course addresses how retailers and brand manufacturers alike have to face new branding and marketing challenges as the retail and distribution environment becomes ever more complex. The rise of global retailers such as WalMart, Best Buy and Amazon has led to a remarkable shift in power from brand manufacturers to retailers. Historically, power in distribution channels has rested upstream with brand marketers such as Philip Morris, manufacturers like Ford, or franchisers such as McDonald’s and PepsiCo. In contrast to these multinational suppliers, most retailers, dealers, and franchisees were local and fragmented. Retailing, and more generally distribution, acquired an image of being a simple, unsophisticated business, undeserving of attention of academics and MBAs. Nowadays, retail giants are increasingly dictating pricing, assortment and branding strategies, often resulting in severe conflicts between brand manufacturers and retailers.
The objective of this course is to learn how to resolve real corporate finance problems with the help of analysis, theory and judgment and in the context of a corporation’s business strategy. Topics include valuation, capital structure, dividends, financing and applications of options in Corporate Finance.
Consulting Skills and Frameworks is a course designed to provide MBA students with immediately usable tools for any team problem solving situation. The core consulting skill training will focus on the all-important “TAP” skills (teamwork, analysis, and presentations) and will introduce the TEAM FOCUS framework which covers the following aspects of team problem solving – Talk, Evaluate, Assist, Motivate, Frame, Organize, Collect, Understand and Synthesize. We will also cover a few of the most critical high level functional frameworks used by top consulting firms today. The course is geared toward any students considering a career in consulting (or other team oriented career track) as well as those students planning on working on a STAR/GBP/practicum action learning projects or participating in case competitions. The course methodology will involve discussions, individual case analysis, guest speakers and a team case competition.
The content of the course is organized to foster learning of pricing strategy and fundamentals, and pricing tactics and implementation. There is an approximately 80-20 mix of case studies and lecture/discussions. My objectives for this course are:
1. To familiarize you with the concepts, theory, and latest thinking bearing on the key issues in pricing, taking the perspective of the marketing manager. This will be done primarily through lectures and assigned readings.
2. To provide you with an opportunity, through extensive case analyses, to apply concepts and theory to the solution of pricing problems in marketing settings.