The Moore School’s graduate operations and supply chain program now ranks No. 6 in North America, according to global research firm Gartner.

USC’s graduate operations and supply chain program climbed 16 spots since the last Gartner ranking was released in 2020.

The ranking is announced as supply chain issues continue impacting the global economy, and companies try to find solutions to the constant shipping delays, shortages in many business sectors and rising costs to provide services and goods.

“The Moore School proudly celebrates the graduate operations and supply chain program advancing to No. 6 on the Gartner top 25 list,” Darla Moore School of Business Dean Peter Brews said. “Our graduate program is one of the most competitive in North America because of the business analytics skills students acquire within our globally focused curriculum and the advanced, real-world operations and supply chain projects they complete. With expert faculty supervision, students provide highly impactful cost savings and efficiencies for Moore School corporate partners while also fostering relationships with executives from those Fortune 500 companies.”

Ranked No. 3 in 2022, the USC undergraduate program’s operations and supply chain ranking leapt two spots from the 2020 biennial list and 10 spots from the 2018 list.

For both the undergraduate and graduate programs, Gartner ranks the top 25 universities in North America according to their program scope, industry value and program size.

Within the Moore School, graduate students specializing in operations and supply chain are predominantly enrolled in the flagship International MBA program, where they take a sequence of five functional courses beyond their core courses. The curriculum spans business-process design and improvement, global sourcing, supply chain management, supply chain planning and control, and project management. One of the specialization requirements is a four-credit-hour, semester-long capstone operations and supply chain consulting project. 

“The experiential learning opportunities available to our graduate students with our corporate partners through the Moore School’s Operations and Supply Chain Center are world class and provide our graduates with a unique advantage in the job market versus students from other programs,” said Mark Ferguson, the Moore School’s senior associate dean for academics and research and the Dewey H. Johnson Professor of management science.   

Each semester, undergraduate and graduate supply chain student teams tackle an analytical issue for more than 40 center corporate partners, including Atrium Health, BMW, Coca-Cola Bottling, Continental Tire, Cummins, Delta Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, McLeod Health, Michelin, Nephron Pharmaceuticals, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Siemens, Sonoco, Trane, UPS and Walmart.

The teams explore how the partners can optimize their supply chain networks, remove waste and procedural inefficiencies and implement new process strategies. They pilot improvements when appropriate and ultimately present their findings to company executives. Since the projects began more than a decade ago, the student groups have identified more than $315 million in cost savings across more than 300 projects.

“Though our graduate students come into the program with work experience, our expert faculty equip them with domain competencies as well as confidence to solve complex supply chain problems for leading firms through experiential projects of the highest caliber,” said Sanjay Ahire, the USC Michael J. Mungo Distinguished Professor of management science and co-director of the Operations and Supply Chain Center.

Moore School operations and supply chain graduate students also compete to earn an industry-validated Sonoco-USC Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification, which gives students advanced problem-solving skills and the statistical tools needed to effectively lead process improvement projects. Close to 1,200 undergraduate and more than 300 graduate students from the university have earned this unique certification through the program.

All of these strengths have enabled the operations and supply chain program to place well-trained talent with leading employers. Examples of those organizations include Accenture, Amazon, Bank of America, BASF, Boeing, Continental Tire, Cummins, Delta Airlines, Honeywell, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Nephron Pharmaceuticals, Roche, Sonoco and UPS.

Read more about the top-ranked Operations and Supply Chain program and how it has impacted alumni.