Get the in-depth knowledge of operational concepts, contexts, data, and strategies you need to create and transform modern, digitally-enabled enterprises.
Overview
Operations lie at the heart of the changes disrupting modern organizations — through global supply chains, sustainability and climate change, safety and security, digitalization, technology, and the sharing economy.
Students in the SSO immersion will learn how to solve important operational problems through case studies, site visits, guest lectures from industry leaders, and a hands-on corporate-sponsored project. At the end of this immersion, students will have gained exposure to operations strategy, contexts, data, and problem-solving frameworks. This knowledge will have been applied to execute a large-scale project, working in cross-disciplinary teams including engineers and human resource professionals.
Career Paths
Consulting and general management
Technology and service operations
Operations and supply chain practitioner – including e-commerce, supply chain management, software, strategic planning, and production management
A Sample of Companies Recruiting Here
Recent SSO students secured MBA internships and full-time employment at prestigious companies such as:
Amazon
Bain
BCG
Corning
Deloitte
Emerson
Ernst & Young
Intel
Johnson & Johnson
McKinsey & Company
PricewaterhouseCoopers
And more…
Highlights
The main highlight of the SSO immersion is the corporate-sponsored project. Recent projects take a future-oriented view of operations, addressing topics such as robotic process automation, reshoring, SKU rationalization, design of a tokenization model for a blockchain, product lifecycle management, and more. Students work extensively with client teams, conduct analysis, build dashboards, and weigh strategic alternatives. Particularly exciting is that client sponsors utilize team work products in either ongoing strategy development, actual implementation of recommendations, or both.
An additional highlight of SSO consists of site visits where you get to see knowledge in action through state-of-the-art processes and interact with both management and workers. SSO is a comprehensive plunge into the heart of operations and provides students with a unique, intense, and exciting learning experience for more than a quarter century.
Curriculum Details
Students enrolled in the SSO immersion focus on how operations are designed and aligned with business context, data, people, and technology to execute the strategic priorities of an organization. SSO’s curriculum consists of four components:
Weekly classes where students apply operations concepts to case studies and interact with guest speakers
Site visits to a variety of industries including healthcare, automotive manufacturing, distribution centers, etc. to see firsthand how corporations align operations, technology, and people to their overall market and product strategy
A 14-week corporate project in which students work cross-disciplinary teams to help a client solve an important problem, applying concepts from operations management, large-scale data analysis, model-building, and technology
Core and elective courses focusing on operations management, data analytics, SQL, digital and retail operations, and managerial accounting
Key Skills Developed
The semester in strategic operations immersion cultivates and strengthens your skills with a special focus on:
Learning to execute a large-scale operations project with outcomes that bring lasting value to an organization
Understanding how operations connects with long-term financial performance metrics and how it is affected by technology and global economic context by studying different types of problems, e.g., in globalization, sustainability, automation, and blockchain
Operations data analytics and modeling for forecasting, supply chain management, customer value generation, etc.
Value-stream mapping
Understanding human capital
Clubs & Associations
Take advantage of clubs, associations, and networking opportunities related to the semester in strategic operations immersion, such as:
As an engineering student who wanted to transition from core technical work and learn more about supply chain, the Semester in Strategic Operations (SSO) was a perfect starting point in terms of exposure to the overall value chain. The different types of cases ranging from Sales & Operations Planning, inventory management, to digitization of supply chain were very useful and provided insights into how existing companies operate and challenges they face when transitioning to new processes.
Additionally, I believe the SSO project is an amazing consulting experience, which helped me learn a lot about managing client relationships and working in teams.
Abhilash Bora, MEng '22
Semester in Strategic Operations helped me feel more comfortable when I was given a project with a large scope and new subject area. I felt confident that by the end of the 10 weeks, I would have a recommendation to share and the task felt less daunting.
Gouthami Dikkala, MBA '23
My internship client project involved working on a supply chain end-to-end (E2E) study with a deep dive in inventory management and vendor relations. Semester in Strategic Operations case studies, factory visits, project on re-shoring of manufacturing, and guest lectures gave me all the tools I needed for my client project. I had the ability to work with real-life data from a SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, do forecasting, and conduct supply chain analysis.
