Consulting masters

Institute of Management Consulting provides students with valuable business experience

You want information – honest information.

And if you represent or manage a corporation, how do you find it? You call CMU’s Institute of Management Consulting (IMC) team.

The IMC team, established in 2003, consists mostly of graduate business students. It is led by Randall Hayes, accounting professor; Lawrence Lepisto, marketing and hospitality services administration professor; and Charles Burke, director of strategic planning for the LaBelle Entrepreneurial Institute.

The IMC faculty members have run the M.B.A. management consulting concentration, researched and studied management consulting techniques, and developed a curriculum in management consulting.

“Before us, no curriculum existed,” Hayes said. “We offer the first full-fledged management consulting concentration in the nation. So we consistently review what is effective and what isn’t.”

Dean Michael Fields said the IMC is one of the College of Business Administration’s “best-kept secrets.”

Project examines Domino’s
human resources packages

With faculty guidance, groups of IMC students team up on consulting projects with businesses and organizations such as Vantage Plastics, Delfield Corporation, and Domino’s Pizza.

Four IMC students, along with Hayes, traveled to Domino’s headquarters in Ann Arbor in late October. Hayes said the IMC has worked with the pizza giant on three consultations.

For this project, CMU students began working with Domino’s human resources department to research and compare compensation packages in the fast food industry for benchmarking purposes.

Debra Williamson, M.B.A. student, said the group talked with Domino’s administrators about what information Domino’s wanted the students to gather and the scope of the project. They need to present their research to the Fortune 500 company by May 1.

“It was the initial meeting to get things rolling,” she said of the October meeting. “To me, this is what the meat of an M.B.A. course ought to be – getting out there and solving real
business problems.

“These consulting classes have taught me how complex change is for people. But since businesses have to stay on top of what is going on in the rest of the world, there is constant change. We are here to help bridge that gap.”

Ask and you shall receive

On a recent Monday, IMC students worked late into the evening trying to come up with research ideas. They decided that phone calls, focus groups, online surveys, and in-person interviews would be the best ways to get information.

Allowing students to travel and conduct face-to-face interviews is an added bonus, according to Hayes. Students have traveled to places including New York City and Atlanta.

“Students traveled around the country to meet with Domino’s general managers. Domino’s wanted to know what the general managers thought of their working conditions and their relationship with corporate,” Hayes said. “Domino’s contacted us because they knew that we could get honest answers because we are a third party, and we work with students.”

Hayes said CMU has a link to the pizza business – which had $5.1 billion in 2006 retail sales – because Domino’s CEO David Brandon was a CMU Board of Trustees member until 1999, when he became Domino’s CEO.

“David has been a great friend to us,” Hayes said. “And he understands the importance of a real-world experience and higher education.”

Students improve business and expandexperience

In addition to involving students in consulting, IMC faculty members choose improvement projects oriented toward human resource issues and projects involving the evaluation of entrepreneurial ideas.

Paul Aultman, president of Vantage Plastics in Standish, said the IMC program has added real value to his company over the past several years.

“I really like this program because it helps you get to the core of your business,” Aultman said. “It’s helped us to look at our organization, identify some issues, and focus on areas weneed to work on.”

In 2006, IMC students incorporated Six
Sigma methodology into Vantage’s waste reduction efforts. This year, an IMC student team will use the project management techniques of Six Sigma to help the company’s Production Efficiency Team develop ways to reduce the amount of scrap in the company’s production systems.

As for entrepreneurial projects, the IMC has two for the 2007-2008 academic year, Hayes said. The first will investigate the business possibilities of a new product line of educational park equipment. The second involves developing a protocol for the evaluation of new product ideas.

“It’s challenging for the M.B.A. graduate students to help clients work through a business problem. It requires creativity. It requires a lot of discipline, and it requires a lot of tools,” Hayes said. “You really can’t understand business from a classroom lecture. You need to go out in the field and see it applied. So we are in the field.”

As for IMC being one of CBA’s best-kept secrets, it won’t be for long. IMC faculty members have published five research papers and one chapter in a professional textbook about the principles of the IMC team.

They have made nine presentations at major national and international business meetings and also conducted a four-day seminar at the University of Lyon, France.

From left, IMC student Theresa Bandkau, Domino’s Manager of Compensation Wun-Ming Yee, IMC student Victoria Makarova, IMC student Debra Williamson, IMC student Karen Philips, Domino’s Manager of Training Drew Helmholtz, and CMU consulting faculty Randall Hayes visited Ann Arbor’s Domino’s Pizza World Headquarters as a start to their consulting project.

A consulting team at Vantage Plastics in Standish is working on a Six Sigma project to reduce the company’s scrap rate. From left, they are IMC student Scott Truscott, CMU consulting faculty member Randall Hayes, Vantage Plastics President Paul Aultman, and IMC students Josh Craft, Lance Eltringham, and Sandeep Rangaraju.