Made to order: Students create lean vendor assessment app

Several executives called it “amazing.” Working under the sponsorship of the executive board of the Network for Value Chain Excellence, six undergraduate supply chain management students developed a lean vendor assessment app that the executives could only describe — and they did it in seven weeks. The project demonstrates the network’s commitment to nurturing future supply chain leaders, but it also underscores that the network itself is useful to its members and industry.

The Network for Value Chain Excellence is a forward-looking group. Members are supply chain management executives who come together twice a year to advance the state of their own value chains, discuss common trends and issues, learn about new faculty research and find talented potential hires. At their fall 2012 meeting, conversation turned to the subject of mobile applications (apps): what are they being used for and what are the barriers to creating them? Network members decided to initiate a project that would help them understand how app creation could be easier and faster than they might think.

The result was an opportunity for six W. P. Carey undergraduate students to tackle a challenging, real world project with immediate industry implications — the development of a lean vendor assessment app. All that before they even graduated!

Working under the sponsorship of the network executive board, the students developed the app and presented their process and finished product to the board in seven weeks. Several of the senior executives at the presentation described the results as amazing.

The project demonstrates the network’s commitment to nurturing future supply chain leaders, but it also underscores that the network itself is useful to its members and industry. Eileen McCulloch, the operations manager for the network, describes the network as a “pull organization.”

“Members identify their needs and pull from it,” she said.

The question

Most of the executive board companies had developed vendor assessment tools but they reported that deploying the tools was labor-intensive, involving large Excel spreadsheets with embedded macros. To complete projects, most required at least two days on-site for even the most skilled assessors. Few, if any, of the tools had access to a database of assessments for comparison, and there was no way to ensure that assessments were objective and unclouded by the evaluator’s personal relationships.

Finally, the tools were inconvenient, typically executed on a laptop computer the assessor had to lug. Why, the executive board wondered, was there no tool for tablets or smart phones?

“It just made sense,” said Ernie Chachere, vice president of marketing and quality for E. & J. Gallo Winery. “How many people do you see walking around with a smartphone, versus walking around with a laptop?” A smartphone app, says Chachere, “would be a tremendously powerful product.”

To gauge interest in such an app, Network Executive Board member Milton Young and McCulloch crafted a mobile technologies deployment survey for the membership at large and for dispersal to global supply chain professionals in diverse service and manufacturing industries. Young is a founding member of the network and a frequent facilitator at the Department of Supply Chain Management’s Corporate Curriculum Reviews. He is also a supply chain and procurement veteran, with stints at companies including Whirlpool and FMC Technologies.

The project

This would be an ideal capstone project for seniors at the W. P. Carey School but for a few wrinkles. First, none of the students had previously developed an app. Second, the students had to complete the app in seven weeks to present at the spring 2013 Network Executive Board meeting.

As daunting as that appeared, “One of the objectives of the project was to prove that it could be done,” says Young. “If we wrote [the tool] for ERP, which has huge amounts of tables and layers of processes, it may be two or three years down the road by the time we got that created. So the purpose of the project was to prove that we could create something quickly, using existing technologies.”

Professors Mohan Gopalakrishnan from supply chain management and Timothy Olsen from computer information systems asked for volunteers and quickly assembled a team of six, including supply chain seniors Erica Lee, Sam Kaserer and Mengqi (Angela) Wan, and computer information systems seniors Hung Nguyen, Francesca Marais and Hannah Go.

All three supply chain students were enrolled in the school’s Network Scholars program. Students are chosen for the program based on work experience, interest in supply chain, leadership potential, and academic standing. The program, an add-on to required coursework, offers students opportunity to learn from network companies about real-world supply chain challenges under the guidance of W. P. Carey senior faculty.

Under Young and McCulloch’s guidance, key criteria for the app evolved. The app must be:

• a mobile phone app rather than a tablet app, to satisfy the most convenient form factor
• web-based rather than entirely mobile, to take advantage of a large database for comparison
• developed for a single device-agnostic platform (jQuery) rather than for iOS or Android

To reduce development time and effort, Young decided to use the Rapid Plant Assessment (RPA) tool created by the University of Michigan. “The dimensions and criteria were fairly straightforward; 20 questions on the first piece, 10 questions on the second, and a very easy-to-understand rating scale,” says Young. “It lent itself very well to putting on the web.” Young also developed a proprietary database of several dozen manufacturing plant assessments for comparison. The app scores a vendor individually; by sector; and compared to the database overall.

The team did most of its work after class, on Fridays and weekends, under the direction of co-sponsors McCulloch and Young (who lives in Texas and joined by teleconference). “All of us are pretty much self starters, passionate about technology,” says Lee, which became important as the project advanced. Neither she nor the CIS students had ever programmed an app. But with guidance from Young and Olsen, and through self teaching, they learned quickly.

The Presentation

Building an enterprise-ready app was just part of the project; creating an enterprise-worthy presentation was the other. “We were pretty nervous – these were heavyweight people in their respective industries, and for those of us who didn’t have jobs lined up, it was a big opportunity to shine,” says Kaserer.

McCulloch and Young guided them in writing an executive summary and report, in creating a professional presentation, and in presentation skills. “Eileen coached us in how to speak with impact, even in hand gestures and body language,” says Kaserer. “We went in there with courage and I guess confidence.”

The training showed. As Chachere describes the Executive Board, “We’re a bunch of people who’ve seen quite a few presentations, and this one was tops in quality, in terms of content and of level and clarity of the messaging. The Network was impressed as well by the sheer execution of the task. As Young recalls, “One member asked ‘Have any of them worked together before?’ No. ‘Or developed an app before?’ No. ‘And they did all of this in seven weeks?’ Yes. And he said, ‘Amazing.’”

“Some of the executives said ‘It’s like the future,’” Wan recalls. “One told us he had been thinking about creating this app for three years. He was very excited to see it.” One Network member quickly asked for a customized app for his company.

“The quality of those students is incredible,” says Chachere. “We couldn’t believe those young men and women were working to help themselves through school and being involved in numerous community activities and leadership positions, in addition to nailing their academics. To me it’s pretty impressive.”

Kaserer credits W. P. Carey with creating the opportunity to interact with companies like E. & J. Gallo. “This kind of project doesn’t happen for most students,” says Kaserer, “and it wouldn’t have been a reality without the contribution of Eileen and Milton, and those companies taking part.”