Teaching retail operations in business and engineering schools

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Teaching retail operations in business and engineering

schools

Citation for published version (APA):

Woensel, van, T., Fisher, M. L., & Fransoo, J. C. (2010). Teaching retail operations in business and engineering schools. (BETA publicatie : working papers; Vol. 317). Technische Universiteit Eindhoven.

Document status and date: Published: 01/01/2010

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Teaching Retail Operations in

Business and Engineering Schools

Tom Van Woensel, Marshall L. Fisher, Jan C. Fransoo Beta Working Paper series 317

BETA publicatie WP 317 (working paper) ISBN ISSN NUR 1532-0545 804 Eindhoven April 2010

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INFORMS TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION Vol. 00, No. 0, Xxxxx 0000, pp. 000–000 issn 1532-0545 | eissn 1532-0545 | 00 | 0000 | 0001

INFORMS

doi 10.1287/xxxx.0000.0000 c ° 0000 INFORMS

Teaching Retail Operations

in Business and Engineering Schools

Tom Van Woensel

Eindhoven University of Technology, School of Industrial Engineering, t.v.woensel@tue.nl Marshall L. Fisher

University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, fisher@wharton.upenn.edu Jan C. Fransoo

Eindhoven University of Technology, School of Industrial Engineering, j.c.fransoo@tue.nl

This paper describes how a Retail Operations course is organized and taught both at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and at the School of Industrial Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology. We present the course outlines and discuss characteristics of teaching retail operations to students in both schools. The differences and similarities between Business Schools and Engineering Schools based on this course are highlighted.

Key words : Retail Operations, engineering, business History :

1. Retail operations and Retail Operations courses

This paper aims to describe how a Retail Operations course is organized both at a business School and an engineering school. As an example for a business school, we take the course organized at Wharton school while Eindhoven University of Technology serves as the engineering school case. In Europe, one of the largest leading research groups is the Retail Operations group, part of the School of Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. In the United States, Professors Marshall Fisher (Wharton School) and Ananth Raman (Harvard Business School) have a significant impact on the retail operations research area.

Retail operations research involves the different parts of the retail supply chain: i.e. the stores, the distribution centers and all distribution and transportation activities involved. The focus are the operational processes in these chains: analyse, understand and potentially improve the retail processes in each part of the chain. Representative publications from the research groups at Whar-ton school and at Eindhoven University of Technology are Gaur and Fisher (2006), Van Donselaar et al. (2010), Fisher (2009), etc. In the wake of this body of research, specific courses on Retail Operations have been organized at these two schools. A reason to write this paper together, is that the Eindhoven course is inspired on the Wharton course, but adapted for the specific environment of an Engineering School.

We believe Retail Operations courses are useful for graduate students in two distinct ways. First, because retailers play a dominant role in many supply chains, it is not only important for retailers but also for manufacturers and distributors to understand the retail processes and their consequences on the total supply chain. Secondly, the problems faced by retailers (data availability, reducing lead-times, complexity, etc.) are shared by many other firms in the industry. As such, these problems are generic and the knowledge obtained via these courses can thus be applied in a variety of industries. In all cases, retail operations courses greatly add to the increase of interest in retailing and operations management/research topics.

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The paper is organized similar to the above described comparison: Sections 2 and 3 give a description of the course at Eindhoven and Wharton, respectively. After this, we describe some of the similarities versus differences observed in the two course realizations (Section 4). We end with some concluding remarks (Section 4).

2. Retail operations at the School of Industrial Engineering,

Eindhoven University of Technology

Since 2002, the Retail Operations research group has been involved in several research and edu-cational projects with European retailers, both in food and non-food, mainly from a supply chain perspective. In 2005, these research efforts were consolidated into a five credit elective course in the two-year Master of Science program of Operations Management & Logistics (in the School of Industrial Engineering).

The Master of Science programs in the School of Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology prepare students for a dual career. The majority of students join industry as an industrial engineer, with a strong emphasis on job related to Operations Management as engineer, analyst, or manager. About 10 percent of the students continue their career as a researcher, studying for a PhD. In Europe, a complete Master’s degree is usually required to enter the PhD program. The dual ambitions of the Master program are quite common, both across IE programs in the US and in Europe. This nature of the Master of Science program in Eindhoven is operationalized in many courses by the use of research papers, by the construction and testing of models, and by conducting field work. Although the Master of Science program in the School of Industrial Engineering has a strong research focus and few students pursue an academic career, most students value the program philosophy and see the benefits both for industry and academia.

In the remainder of this section, we describe and discuss the Retail Operations course on a number of criteria: the positioning of the course, the course themes and material (a complete syllabus and a list of references are provided in appendix), the insights emerging from the course for the students, the course evaluation and, last but not least, the lessons learned for instructors. 2.1. Positioning of the course

The course has a stable annual enrollment of around 60 to 70 students from the School of Industrial Engineering (cohort is around 120 students). Minimal fluctuations in the enrollment are mainly depending upon the other electives offered in the same period. Typically, students follow this course in their first year of the M.Sc. program. The faculty involved in the course are the ones involved in the Retail Operations research group. The course is organized over 10 contact weeks of class sessions of straight lectures (two hours per week each) and five remaining weeks dedicated to project work. The specific focus of the course is on the operational processes in retailing rather than on different marketing issues (but some of these marketing issues are discussed as background material). The student is expected to be able to understand these processes in the retail sector and be able to model them. Over the years we taught the course, the students’ evaluation has always been very good, showing their appreciation for the course.

In relation to other Industrial Engineering courses in the Operations Management & Logistics program, various concepts covered earlier in the Bachelor program are used, but they are framed within and adapted for the retail environment. More specifically, the course builds on forecasting models (e.g. regressions, ARIMA, etc.), stochastic inventory models with lost sales, capacity utiliza-tion models, data collecutiliza-tion methods (e.g. time and moutiliza-tion studies, interviews, etc.), informautiliza-tion systems tools (data warehousing), simulation studies, etc.. In the Master program, considerable attention is given to designing and building operational systems. In the Retail Operations course, this is translated by explicitly taking a design perspective, where the application of the theories, methodologies and skills developed in the Bachelor and Master program is expected.

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Van Woensel, Fisher and Fransoo: Teaching Retail Operations

INFORMS Transactions on Education 00(0), pp. 000–000, c° 0000 INFORMS 3

2.2. Course content and material

As the Retail Operations course is closely related to the research carried out in the School of Indus-trial Engineering, we mainly focus on food retailers and general merchandize (e.g. fashion) retailers in a bricks-and-mortar setting. The topics described in Table 1 are covered in the course with an emphasis on the operations management aspects. Of course, a certain marketing perspective is needed to better frame the operational decisions. For example, inventory management decisions are a function of what marketing decides on the minimum displayed quantity which should be on the shelf. Note that the difference between the strategic, tactical and operational level is not always clear-cut. For example, the actual inventory policy chosen can be situated on the strategic/tactical level, while setting the parameters and using the inventory policy is an operational issue. Addi-tionally, managers can deviate from the inventory policy during the operations, leading to changes on the tactical or even strategic level (e.g. different use of personnel).

Table 1 Topics covered in the Retail Operations course in Eindhoven.

Marketing Operations

Strategic level

Target markets Retail Supply Chain strategies

Products Grocery retailing versus Fashion retailing Tactical level

Supply Chain coordination Warehousing and Transportation Assortment planning Planograms

Operational level

Demand Forecasting Forecasting demand based on Point Of Sales Customer Service Check-out counters and backrooms

Minimum on display Inventory Management for regular products Inventory Management for perishable products Inventory handling and shelf stacking

RFID applications

Advertising Promotions inventory management Data accuracy and Data Management

Note: a planogram identifies the exact location and number of facings of the stock keeping units on the shelf in the store.

The complete course outline and the used references are provided in the online appendix. 2.3. Insights

The Retail Operations course aims to make the students acquainted with both the Dutch and International retail sector. In the course an overview of the relevant research questions playing in the retail sector is given. This is materialized by studying the most important papers in different decision areas of retailing (i.e. seminal papers on inventory control, distribution, store operations,

etc.). Moreover, the student should be able to read and position retail operations management

papers within the framework offered by this course.

Throughout the course, we develop managerial insights for the retail sector and use quantitative and empirical modeling skills. With regard to the use of research papers and models in the course, note that this fits very well with the course (and for that matter, also program) objectives. Students are expected to be able to construct and implement the models and problems that they are studying. This goes far beyond either the typical MBA objective of appreciating the insights, and takes more depth than is typical in an undergraduate textbook with relatively simple models.

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2.4. Course evaluation

Students are evaluated based on two assignments during the course: the Practice Assignment and the Final Assignment. These types of assignments are closely related to the objectives of the course: the Practice Assignment makes students acquainted with the Retail sector as a whole. The Final Assignment focuses more on the development of the modeling skills framed in the retail environment, i.e. based on specific retail research questions. We give more details on both the Practice Assignment and the Final Assignment.

The Practice Assignment (PA) One of the great advantages of studying retail operations is that many aspects of a retailer’s supply chain are on public display in their store. Retailers are different from each other: they target different markets, have different formats, and aim at realizing their financial performance in different ways. All this is reflected in their operational execution visible in the stores and their communication towards the customers. In this Practice Assignment, students are expected to detail out the operational execution of two retailers offering retail services in the same category.

For each of the two retail formats the student is expected to describe the following points:

• The retail strategy: market, format, competitive advantages, pricing strategy, financial strat-egy, operations strategy

• The store execution: describe the in-store process in substantial detail, identify the key metrics by which the two stores differ and make a quantitative estimate of these differences (e.g. sales per square meter, margin, number of customers per employee)

• Explain the success of one store over the other.

Students form a team of two and choose two stores to visit in the same segment (e.g. grocery: ALDI versus Albert Heijn; fashion: H&M versus Zara). Prior to the visit, students are expected to browse the website of the retailers for background information. All relevant information and data is collected from public sources (annual reports, internet); students should also conduct at least one interview with the store manager in each store.

After the visits, they hand in a short report on the major differences between both retail com-panies. This report should show proper use of the relevant concepts and models as discussed in the course so-far and from their previous education programs.

The Final Assignment (FA) In the last five weeks of the semester no class lectures are organized, leaving time for the students to work on their Final Assignment. This Final Assignment is a research exercise which the students have to handle in groups of two. Students receive a group-specific assignment which focuses on a group-specific research question in the area of Retail Operations. As such, one specific aspect (e.g. inventory management, shelf space allocations, people, etc.) covered in class is deepened in the Final Assignment. The starting point of the Final Assignment is mostly a leading academic paper from which they start working, and extend, adapt, and criticize (e.g. on the assumptions made) the model in this paper. Some examples of these papers are Berman and Larson (2004), Cachon (2001), Gupta, Hill and Bouzdine-Chameeva (2006) or Kapalka, Katircioglu and Puterman (1999).

We explicitly state and expect that students use a modeling perspective for the Final Assignment. Specifically, we want them to tackle the problem, describe the process and analytically model this process. The FA is thus typically quantitative and empirical involving the use of mathematical and statistical models. Afterwards, these models are optimized either via simulation or via analytical optimization tools available from the involved faculty. If needed, we provide students subsets of our extensive datasets available from the different retailers we collaborate with. Each group is assigned a FA tutor (i.e. the faculty teaching the course) who follows the students closely and gives feedback at regular moments. These tutors are available a number of slots in every week the students work on their assignment. They get feedback on their work and can ask clarification questions on the models where needed.

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Some example questions are:

• Study the paper from Berman and Larson (2004). Study the model that they are proposing and implement the model in an Excel spreadsheet. Set up a numerical experiment to investigate the value of the model. The value of the model could be related to its sensitivity to assumptions, its ability to support decision making, its robustness, etc. Evaluate the assumptions made in this paper by using the provided dataset on check-out counters. What are the pitfalls, advantages, etc. of using these models.

• Study the paper from Hackmann and Rosenblatt (1990). Study the model that they are propos-ing and implement the model (in MS Access, MS Excel or Matlab). Set up a numerical experiment to investigate the value of the model for planogramming purposes (minimizing the number of back-room replenishments) based on a set of POS data from the Retail Group (available upon request). The value of the model could be related to its sensitivity to assumptions, its ability to support decision making, its robustness, etc.

• Compare and evaluate a (R, s, nQ)-reorder-policy1 _{with two different ways of forecasting sales}

with a weekpattern using exponential smoothing: the first option uses only historic data for a specific weekday t if weekday t has to be forecasted. the second option uses all weekdays. Consider the differences between the two options for 3 scenario’s: no trend, small trend and large uptrend followed by large downtrend in sales per week.

The students are expected to write a short paper (max. 2000 words) and a poster on their implementation and the conclusions of the analysis. They also should submit the model and all other files used for grading.

2.5. Lessons for instructors

One critical issue we experienced is that, since we do not organize a final exam but only have a very specific final assignment per group of students, students are less involved with the course material in the broad sense as they work on a more narrow assignment for their final grade. Clearly, the Final Assignment only deepens one facet of the complete contents and is inherently unable to cover all contents. Next to this, students only get feedback on their own work directly from their Final Assignment tutor, but do not know much about the work of the other students. Therefore, we organize a closing session in which all students present their work in a number of poster sessions. These posters are also circulated via the online student learning system. Consequently, the students receive a broader picture with the closing of the course.

3. Retail operations at the Wharton School, University of

Pennsylvania

The course Retail Supply Chain Management is an elective course first taught in January-February 2002. The course is one of the two required courses (together with a marketing course) of the undergrad concentration in retailing. Next to this, there is a strong interest from MBA students. This course examines how retailers understand their customers’ preferences and respond with appropriate products through effective supply chain management. Supply chain management is vitally important for retailers and has been noted as the source of success for many retailers such as Wal-mart (grocery), Amazon (e-retailing) and Dell (computer). In the remainder of this section, we follow the same structure to describe the Wharton school course as for the course offered in Eindhoven.

1_{At each review moment R, if inventory is less than s, then order the minimum number of case packs n of size Q}

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3.1. Positioning of the course

The Wharton curriculum allows for mini courses consisting of 13 sessions of 80-minutes. The course is now offered in two sections in September-October, and taken by more than 100 students, approximately two thirds of them are MBA students and one third are undergraduate students. For MBA students, it counts towards a major in Operations Management. Within the MBA program offered, this is the only operations course that deals with retailing. Many of the MBA students have some retail experience or have been working in a marketing position in industry. The course builds on aspects of inventory management theory from the core supply chain course, especially news-vendor and lost-sales inventory management is used intensively. Around 50 to 120 MBA students take the course, depending on how many sections are offered (the MBA cohort is around 800 students).

3.2. Course content and material

The course is organized around six broad themes: 1) linking finance and operations in retailing, 2) planning the assortment of products a retailer should carry in each store, 3) optimizing the inventory carried of each stock keeping unit (SKU) in each store, 4) pricing, especially during the product end-of-life markdown period, 5) store execution and 6) supply chain design. These topics are fundamental operations issues for retailers and are closely related to the research on retail operations done at Wharton. More specifically, the course follows the example outline as described in Table 2. The actual timing might be different year per year, but the organization of topics is stable.

Table 2 Topics covered in the Retail Operations course at the Wharton School.

Topic

Class 1 Course overview

Assortment optimization

Class 2 Forecasting & inventory optimization for new products Class 3 Linking finance and operations for publicly traded stocks Class 4 Store Level Execution at Wawa

Class 5 End-of-life management; pricing

Class 6 Amazon.com’s European Distribution Strategy

Retailer Head to Head Competition Project teams and retailers due Class 7 Advance Auto’s Availability Excellence initiative

Class 8 The Home Depot, Inc. Class 9 Urban Outfitters

Class 10 Supply Chain Management at Wal-mart Class 11 McDonald’s: Optimizing Restaurant Design Class 12 World Company

Class 13 Destination Maternity

Classes 1, 2 and 4 are lectures based on Chapters 2 and 3 of the forthcoming book by Fisher and Raman (2010). Classes 5, 6, 7, 10, 11 and 12 are case discussions. The cases for classes 5 and 6 are Wharton cases prepared by Marshall Fisher and the others are standard Harvard Business School cases. Classes 3, 8, 9 and 13 are devoted to guest speakers, either presenting their company or, in the case of class 13, discussing an issue from their professional perspective. Guests are also present for some of the case discussions and make comments during the discussion and at the end of class as a wrap up. The two class sessions are 10:30-11:50 and 1:30-2:50 which enables guests to go to lunch with a group of students between classes, which gives the students an opportunity to interact informally and ask questions of the guest. A sample of guests participating in the course are: Rebecca Matthias (Founder and President from Destination Maternity), David Johnston (EVP and COO, Wawa), Catherine Martin (Vice President MacDonalds Corporation).

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The complete course outline and references used are provided in the online appendix. 3.3. Insights

Most of the students have backgrounds in analytics or have a real-world connection with retailers. For both groups of students, the insights obtained are valuable. Specifically, students experience the retail area as a good and useful context for the analytical skills acquired. Alternatively, the large six areas discussed in the course outline above serve as a useful framework for thinking rigorously about retailers.

Even if students do not expect to work for a retailer, the insights from the course can be useful in two ways. First, because retailers are such dominant players in many supply chains today, it is important that the processes they follow be understood by manufacturers and distributors, or by the consultants and bankers that service retailers and their suppliers. Second, the problems retailers face (e.g., making data accessible, interpreting large amounts of data, reducing lead-times, eliciting the best efforts from employees, and so forth), are shared by firms in many other industries. It is easier to understand these issues through case studies in retailing because everybody experiences the industry as consumers and can readily relate to chronic problems such as stock-outs and markdowns.

From the observation that most managers in a operations-intensive setting spend little time reading and even less time writing reports, the development of speaking and listening skills is given a high priority in this course. The classroom should be considered a laboratory in which the student can test his ability to clearly present his analyses and recommendations, to convince the peers of the correctness of the approach to complex problems and to illustrate his ability to achieve the desired results through the implementation of that approach. This requirement is also reflected in the course evaluation, as discussed in the next section.

3.4. Course evaluation

Grading is 30% class participation, 40% individual write-ups of the discussion questions for four of the case class sessions and 30% on a retailer head-to-head project done in teams of 3-5 students to compare two retailers that compete for the same customers in a given segment. The project leverages the fact that frequently two or more retailers will compete head to head for the same customers in a given product segment, e.g. Borders vs. Barnes & Noble and CVS vs. Rite Aid

vs. Walgreen. This is a wonderful opportunity to learn about retail supply chain management by

examining the different choices made by two competing firms facing similar challenges. In this project, students form teams of 3 to 5 people and learn about retail supply chain management by studying in depth two retailers that compete head to head, following the steps listed below.

1. Choose two competing retailers with stores accessible to you for a visit. Ideally they should be publicly traded or else it will be harder to get information.

2. Compare their stock performance over the last few years.

3. Scan their financial reports and gather information on as many of the metrics discussed in class as you can. The most important ones covered are e.g. sales growth, Comp store sales increase, New store openings, Gross margin %, Inventory turns, Asset turns, etc. The students should be able to identify the major differences between the two retailers in these metrics and try to explain these differences based on your observations of the retailers operating practices.

4. Browse each company’s web site, read articles about them and scan their annual reports. 5. Visit one or more stores of each retailer. One of the great advantages of studying retail supply chains is that many aspects of a retailer’s supply chain are on public display in their stores. Stores can be compared on many dimensions, e.g. product, people, execution, store design, etc.

6. This analysis should lead to the conclusions: Which of the two retailers is more successful and what explains their success i.e. what are they doing differently than the other retailer? Could this be copied? What advice can be given to the laggard?

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7. The only deliverable on this project is a crisp 10-minute final presentation to be given at the end of the term, and the associated slide deck.

3.5. Lessons for instructors

A good option is for case discussions to have a senior executive from the company to be present in class. In some cases, the guests are protagonists in the case being discussed that day and will serve as a resource during the class discussions and make remarks and answer questions for about 20-25 minutes at the end of class. In other cases, the entire class will be devoted to a discussion lead by the guest about their company. This allows for lively discussions and the validation of proposed ideas by comparing it directly to the real-life situation through the company representative. The store-comparison project to be carried out in the real situation is also a novel approach which makes students enthusiastic for studying retail operations.

4. Discussion and concluding remarks

Clearly, retailing is an exciting environment and a great setting to explore different operations management concepts. This is well represented in the described courses: many topic taught in Operations Management type of courses are also handled in the Retail Operations courses but taking the retail environment as the framework. Moreover, both courses make good use of the fact that students are also consumers and as such, also participate in the specific retail environment itself. Both courses are elective courses where the majority of the audience attending are graduate students.

Students are expected to look further than what they see or do in the day-to-day practice. For this purpose, students have to identify the strategies, the operational realizations, the problems,

etc. by comparing a number of retailers. This practical aspect of visiting retailers and questioning

them on their strategy, operations marketing, etc. is a common aspect found in both courses. The easy accessability of the real-life retail environment is an important asset which can and should be utilized in any retail operations course, as recognized by the students in their course evaluations.

There are of course differences between both courses. The students following the course are clearly different. Students from the Industrial Engineering school in Eindhoven have little practical professional experience working in a retail environment, while this is the opposite in Wharton where many students have some working experience in the retail environment. This latter is clearly driven by the fact that most students attending the Wharton course are MBA students. This also means that students from Eindhoven have a more mathematical/analytical background in Operations Management via the Bachelor and Master program in Industrial Engineering. Finally, note that the reason to choose for the course is different too (based on some anecdotal evidence): the Eindhoven students mainly choose the course to apply in a very familiar setting many of the concepts they have learned in different Operations Management courses; the Wharton students have been faced with many of the issues in real-life and seek for a structured and scientific discussion of these topics. The starting point of both courses is also different: the Wharton course is case-based (i.e. ana-lyzing a real-life retail business problem, developing a plan for improvement and articulating it), while the Eindhoven course is more lecture-based where the lectures are directly grounded in the scientific retailing literature, rather than starting from the direct real-life problem as described in a case. In Eindhoven, the input from real-life is much related to the use of the proprietary datasets during the course both in the classes to show examples as in their final assignment work for the course. A consequence of this difference is the possible presence of a representative from a retail company in the classes. Additionally, some organizational differences exist, e.g. group sizes, number of classes, etc. These are mostly influenced by the number of students enrolled in the course: in Eindhoven, this is around 60 to 70; in Wharton, enrollment is around 150.

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We presented two realizations of a retail operations course, each targeted for a different student audience: Business School students versus Industrial Engineering students. For this purpose, the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and the school of Industrial Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology serve as representative examples. Both courses are constantly changing, reflecting the fact that the retail arena is not a steady-state environment. Drivers for these changes come both from the evolving academic research and from the changing retail practice.

Acknowledgments

We thank the reviewers and the Editor for their useful remarks in improving the paper.

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