In a competitive global economy, businesses are looking for every advantage to become faster, leaner and more efficient. Now, a new academic discipline — led by an SBA professor — is being created at a university in South Korea, where students will learn to integrate business principles, physics, and computer and engineering disciplines as a means of serving management in a more scientific way.
Vijayan Sugumaran, Ph.D., professor of Management Information Systems in the School of Business Administration, was selected to help establish an academic major in service systems management and engineering (SSME) at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea.
SSME is an emerging field that aims to apply science, management, and engineering disciplines to help companies establish systems that improve the delivery of services or the manufacture of products.
Backed by a $10 million, three-year grant from the Korean government (Korea Research Foundation), Sugumaran and 11 other professors — six from Sogang and six from other universities — will shape and teach the new curriculum. This multidisciplinary approach focuses on business processes, emphasizing the roles of business leaders and employees in achieving objectives while considering how their actions may impact other people or services. Service systems are complex systems that attempt to create value by integrating people, technology, internal and external systems, and shared information or knowledge.
“In the auto industry, engineers in a conventional work environment might focus on designing a component with a single criterion — maybe the part needs to be lightweight,” Dr. Sugumaran says. “With a service systems engineering approach, those engineers might also take into account how a mechanic will get to the part to repair or replace it, too. This adds more value to the process. In the SSME approach, the focus shifts from the product to service; the product is treated simply as a mechanism to provide service to customers and maintain a long term relationship.”
The concept extends beyond the manufacturer to suppliers, as well, he says. “In SSME, we also look to improve communication between suppliers,” Dr. Sugumaran says. “When all the vendors involved start talking to each other, they have a better understanding of how their components are interrelated and can make relevant improvements or adjustments.”
Another example he cites comes from information technology, his area of expertise. “There is increasing global concern about how we can dispose of technology products so that they don’t harm the environment,” he says. “With the conventional approach, safe disposal is secondary. But in the service science environment, concerns around ‘green’ practices and issues are elevated.”
Preparing service scientists
The new SSME major at Sogang will combine knowledge from business management, physics, and computer engineering for an initial enrollment of 40 students. A co-principal investigator, Sugumaran is teaching a course in service systems analysis and design.
Dr. Sugumaran is spending the 2010 calendar year at Sogang University. During the subsequent two years, he will spend one academic semester teaching and conducting research at Sogang, returning to OU for the alternate semesters. He previously has collaborated with a Sogang computer science professor on research on a number of topics, generating several journal and conference papers and, recently, a book entitled, Applied Software Product Line Engineering.
“Our goal in Korea is to prepare students to be service scientists,” Dr. Sugumaran explains. “During the grant period, we will determine how to train them so that when they graduate, they meet the expectations and needs of companies looking for employees who understand and embrace SSME.”
Bringing it back home
One of his challenges is generating classroom discussion — something that is not as common in Korea as it is in American universities. “Korean students are very obedient,” he says. “It will take a little while to get them comfortable talking in class because that’s counter to their culture.”
Much of what Dr. Sugumaran learns in his experience at Sogang will find its way back to OU, he says, perhaps applied to an SSME certificate program or a master’s program. Offering an SSME curriculum would place OU in elite company, he points out, as only a handful of U.S. colleges or universities currently offer SSME instruction. Students graduating from those schools are in demand from employers such as IBM and Cisco Systems, Inc.
“More and more service companies worldwide are looking for graduates with this broader knowledge base,” he says. “They want them to be more than engineers — they must wear many hats.”
While Dr. Sugumaran’s mission to help launch Sogang’s SSME curriculum means traveling halfway around the world, it’s a transition that he says he and his wife welcome. “I am very excited about having an opportunity to do something new and different in a very different environment.”
By: Sandra Beckwith is a freelance writer from Fairport, N.Y.
Originally published in the Spring 2010 issue of OU Magazine.
In a competitive global economy, businesses are looking for every advantage to become faster, leaner and more efficient. Now, a new academic discipline — led by an SBA professor — is being created at a university in South Korea, where students will learn to integrate business principles, physics, and computer and engineering disciplines as a means of serving management in a more scientific way.
Vijayan Sugumaran, Ph.D., professor of Management Information Systems in the School of Business Administration, was selected to help establish an academic major in service systems management and engineering (SSME) at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea.