senberg School's Operations Management Program Excels as Advocate for Productivity and Quality

Faculty Spotlight: Professor Soren Bisgaard

"I do quality management, not quality control," Isenberg Professor of Quality Management Soren Bisgaard told a gathering of students and faculty members at a public lecture, organized by the UMass Amherst chapter of INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). "The idea is not merely to invent a product but to pursue innovation as a manageable process from inspiration to market. Quality management, including Six Sigma, is a way of systematizing innovation. We need to get serious about that as the world economy becomes increasingly competitive," insisted Bisgaard. That competitiveness, he continued, includes shorter product cycle times, rapid diffusion of products and processes, and widely disparate manufacturing costs in different countries.

Now in his fourth year at the Isenberg School, Bisgaard is the newest member of an exceptional quintet of operations management faculty members. An internationally prominent educator and consultant in Six Sigma Quality Management and applied statistics, Bisgaard has been honored with numerous academic and professional awards, including the Shewhart Medal-the American Society for Quality Management's highest honor. He has been Professor and Director of the Department of Quality Management and Technology at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Soren has international name recognition as a statistician and in quality management circles. His arrival here was a coup for the Amherst campus and the operations management program," observes fellow OM faculty member Alan Robinson.

With the addition of Bisgaard to its small but stellar ranks, the operations management program appears-forgive the boxing metaphor-pound for pound as accomplished as any academic program on the Amherst campus. The four OM faculty members each have distinct research and teaching interests, but all share a passion for improving productivity and quality in the workplace. Alan Robinson focuses on the generation and dissemination of ideas and innovation in organizations. Anna Nagurney, the John F. Smith Memorial Professor of Operations Management, devises computer network models that strive for optimal solutions in transportation, communication, financial, and other complex systems. Iqbal Agha (formerly Ali) creates equations that bring greater efficiency to supply chains, logistics, and production scheduling.

As the Amherst campus' first Isenberg professor, Bisgaard has an additional responsibility: promoting campus-wide research and curricular ties among business, science, and technology. Bisgaard's chair was created by Eugene M. Isenberg to arm future managers with an understanding of science and engineering, and to expose future scientists to management skills. Since Bisgaard's appointment, the Amherst campus has established two additional Isenberg chairs-one held by College of Engineering dean Michael Malone, and the other (not yet occupied) under the aegis of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. "Each of the Isenberg professors views these cross-disciplinary relationships from a different vantage. Soren's is statistics and business," observes former Isenberg School Dean Tom O'Brien.

A statistician by trade, Bisgaard uses statistical tools to pinpoint and extirpate inefficiencies in the production stream. "Inspection in the workplace is the antithesis of what I do. It addresses symptoms, not underlying causes," Bisgaard explained during his INFORMS lecture. "It stipulates acceptable error rates and asks us to live with them." Bisgaard employs statistical sampling and analysis to isolate problems and flesh out their causes. In his work for a manufacturer of outboard motors, for example, he divided cylinders in motor blocks into sectors in his search for concentrated error patterns in their manufacture. By statistically pinpointing those concentrations, he determined that the risers for accommodating fuel overflow were in the wrong place. "We eliminated rather than inspected the problem," he told the students. "That was leadership, not management."

"Scientific method and experimental design should be core topics in the [operations management] management science curriculum," Bisgaard continued. "Good theory and good practice go hand-in-hand. We benefit by going back and forth between induction and deduction; between hypotheses and data." Alan Robinson concurs. "When the late W. Edwards Deming lectured here more than a decade ago, he emphasized the importance of focusing on the needs and insights of workers and the interconnectedness of work processes. He added, though, that such empiricism must always be informed by theory," recalls Robinson. Robinson's own books, in fact, go well beyond that: workers' ideas and the work environment play a critical role in shaping theory and superior performance as well.

Next: Professor Alan Robinson