Bridging the Gap between Practice and Undergraduate Teaching of Operations Management: The Case of Public Liberal Arts Colleges

When teaching Operations Management (OM) in a liberal arts setting, two issues arise -the lack of interest and knowledge retention by the students. This paper suggests that these are due to the lack of integration of OM with other business disciplines when taught and the divergence between what working students experience in practice and how OM is taught. To address these, the paper suggests the use of a familiar strategy model -the value chain -as a platform to show how OM is integrated and interdependent with all other business courses which can raise interest in the subject. To assist with knowledge retention, the paper presents an integrated model of OM where the topics covered in the course are linked to each other as a system. This model can be shown in the beginning of the course and evaluated at the end where participants can contemplate how the model should be expanded/modified to incorporate developments in other fields such as logistics (especially last-mile practices), artificial intelligence or servitization.