Northeastern uses business moxie to polish its MBA

When he took over Northeastern University's College of Business Administration last year, dean Thomas Moore was eager to make a mark in a region filled with some of the world's top business schools. His challenge, in business terms, was differentiation.

Moore approached the problem like a businessman, surveying his ''customers" -- the companies that hire Northeastern students -- to see what they wanted in freshly minted MBA graduates.

The feedback sparked a rebranding campaign that Northeastern is rolling out at school events and mailings to applicants this fall, and a makeover of its MBA program that will begin next year. If Harvard Business School has staked its claim on leadership, MIT's Sloan School on technology, Boston College's Carroll School on finance, and Babson College on entrepreneurship, Northeastern wants to be known as the area's go-to business school for supply chain management.

Once a pedestrian subject likely to induce classroom dozing and repel ambitious students, supply chains -- the ways businesses find parts, make products, warehouse them, and transport them to customers -- has emerged, improbably, as one of the hottest fields in American business. Northeastern, long known as a blue-collar school scrapping for respect in the shadow of academic patricians, wants its business students to be among the first to capitalize on it.

Northeastern has taught supply chain logistics for 30 years, but only now is elevating it to a core career track to heighten the job prospects of the 65 to 75 students it graduates from its two-year MBA program each year. ''We found the supply chain is an underserved area," said Moore, who formerly led executive education at Babson.

For companies, supply chain technology and process have become powerful competitive levers. Dell has cut costs, fattened its profits, and revolutionized computer sales with its direct-to-consumer model. Speeding shipments, slashing inventories, and driving hard bargains with suppliers has made Wal-Mart a low-price juggernaut.

Logistics has ''gone from being plumbing and back-office functions to being strategic," said Steve Matthesen, global head of the supply chain practice for Boston Consulting Group. ''There's a growing appreciation by the CEOs of the world that supply chains drive strategy today, and it can be used to your benefit or your detriment. No one is getting a supply chain MBA to run the trucking department."

Indeed, area employers recruiting Northeastern MBAs -- such as EMC Corp., TJX Cos., and W.R. Grace & Co. -- are clamoring for managers to boost productivity and efficiency in their supply chains.

More than a dozen other US schools, from MIT to Boston University to Michigan State, also are responding. But ''we're going to be creating the longest and most focused specialization in town," said Bruce Clark, faculty director of the Northeastern MBA program.

Northeastern's makeover, tagged ''Partner with Industry," will also establish core MBA career tracks in marketing and finance. Those traditionally have been strong areas for Northeastern but, like supply chain management, they'll be expanded next fall with new faculty hires, course offerings, and ''service agreements" with companies.

In all three specialty areas, Northeastern will beef up training in skills such as project management, negotiations, and communications.

MBA students will be required to do a six-month ''corporate residency" (an updated version of Northeastern's famous undergraduate coop program) and a business plan project in their second year.

Leaders of the business college say they see supply chains as the big new opportunity, based on their conversations with recruiters and hiring executives.

''We really wanted to get close to the ground to see what they were looking for," Moore said. ''There's demand for supply chain managers, and it's neglected by business schools."

That demand was underscored in a visit to campus this month by Anthony A. Chiarello, president of Maersk Logistics USA Inc., the American arm of the Danish shipping giant, who told Northeastern students he had 150 job openings in his US logistics operations.

''The job market is phenomenal," said Bob Leib, a transportation and logistics professor who will be heading the new supply chain track at Northeastern. ''A number of our undergraduate students have four or five job offers as coops in the supply chain area."

Multiple job offers also have become common for supply chain students from other schools. Chris Caplice, executive director of MIT's master's program in engineering and logistics, said 94 percent of his students had job offers when they graduated last spring, with average starting salaries 60 percent higher than what they'd earned before entering the program. ''It's all about the supply chain," he said.

Juggling job offers and looking to a new crop of heroes -- like Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr., who rose through the ranks by mastering the supply chain -- students who gravitate to the field are no longer sheepishly telling people at parties about their chosen niche.

''There's a stigma that it can be a dull area," conceded Brett Rice, a second-year Northeastern MBA student with a supply chain concentration. ''But if you start talking about what Wal-Mart's been able to accomplish and what Dell's been able to accomplish, then you start looking at the supply chain in a different light. It's got more cachet."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.