Teaching Tip: Taking Your OM Students on a Company Visit

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, then taking your OM class on a company tour is probably worth 1,000 pictures.  Every semester, Jay and I plan at least one outing. When I was at UNO, my classes toured the operations of a washing machine manufacturer, a tie maker, and a toilet maker (American Standard). Here in Orlando, we have toured Regal Marine and Wheeled Coach (both featured in our video case series), the Orlando Sentinel newspaper, Lucent’s $1 billion chip plant, and an auto parts manufacturer.

 While at George Mason U., my OM classes had over 300 students, making tours  impossible. Jay and I recognized the need for OM videos, and our series now has over 30 custom-made films tied to the text chapters. If  it’s service organizations you want to show, we have  Hard Rock, Arnold Palmer Hospital, and Darden Restaurants. For manufacturing videos, the series features Frito-Lay, Wheeled Coach(ambulances), and Regal Marine (luxury boats).

Either way, the sad fact is that probably 99% of our students have never seen the inside of a factory, or the operations side of an airline, hospital, or newspaper.

A key element in my tours, though, is encouraging the students to really learn from the talks and walks. Each must turn in a paper with a paragraph on how the company we visited deals with the 10 OM decisions about which the text is organized. In other words, what is the company’s product strategy? What is its quality plan? How did it select this location? How does it manage its supply chain, etc?

A colleague at FIU likes to take his students for a behind-the-scenes tour of Miami’s Hard Rock Cafe. He first shows several of the Hard Rock videos in class to set the stage. Wherever you tour, your students will come away with a better appreciation of the critical role of OM.