Survey ranks Penn State No. 1 in supply chain education

University Park, Pa. -- A recent survey of supply chain practitioners and academics in Canada, Mexico and the United States ranks Penn State's Smeal College of Business as having the top supply chain program in North America.

Stephen M. Rutner of Georgia Southern University and Stanley E. Fawcett of Brigham Young University asked more than 1,000 supply chain and logistics professionals and 175 college and university educators to rank the top 20 programs in North America.

Smeal finished number one in both the practitioner and academic rankings, drawn from 154 respondents.

Gene Tyworth, chair of Smeal's supply chain and information systems department, calls the ranking a "testimony to the talent of our research and teaching faculty and to our collegial work environment."

"This achievement is especially gratifying for our faculty and staff because it ratifies the 2002 decision to merge our business logistics program with our management science and information systems program," Tyworth says. "We created a unique new program that not only combines logistics, operations, and information systems, but respects interdisciplinary research methods."

Rutner and Fawcett announced their findings in an article entitled "The State of Supply Chain Education" in the September 2005 issue of Supply Chain Management Review. According to the article, Penn State was ranked number one by the academic respondents in a similar study published in 1995 -– "State of Logistics Education."