Technological change has vastly expanded the scope and importance of supply chains. With so much on the line, we designed a curriculum that blends industry best practices, business acumen, strategy, and leadership skills. The combination of Foster’s world-class faculty, industry leaders in the classroom, and hands-on experience will help you drive innovation in your organization. Orientation prepares you for success from day one.
Prior to orientation, each student completes the Foster Excel for Business course—an online module that ensures you know spreadsheet fundamentals and teaches you advanced features invaluable in your coursework and throughout your career.
Highlights
Flexible Schedule
MSCM’s flexible schedule allows you to continue to work full-time.
Classes meet:
Mondays and Wednesdays, 6 – 9:30pm
Every other Saturday, 8:30am – 4:30pm
Outside class study time typically ranges between 15-20 hours a week.
See 12-month Calendar
Build Connections
Networking with supply chain leaders is built directly into the MSCM curriculum. You’ll gain critical access to esteemed Foster faculty, industry leaders, and fellow supply chain professionals.
Courses
The Master of Supply Chain Management is a 12-month (4 quarters), degree program that begins in summer quarter of each year and completes in spring. MSCM is a STEM degree program. See the tabs below for a list of all Master of Supply Chain Management classes and course descriptions by quarter breakdown.
In this course, you will learn the basics of financial accounting, managerial accounting, and finance. You will learn how transactions affect a firm’s financial statements, as well as how to analyze financial statements, make long and short-term decisions, and evaluate and incentivize managers.
Upon course completion, you will be skilled in leveraging probability models and inferential statistics for robust business analysis. Through hands-on activities, you will apply these concepts and explore the integration of AI tools to enhance your analytical capabilities.
This course equips students with practical negotiation, communication, and persuasion skills that have proven effective in real-world scenarios. Former students have shared success stories such as increasing job offer salaries by 10%, saving thousands on car purchases, securing higher equity in their start-ups, and improving relationships with colleagues. The course’s blend of theoretical insights and hands-on practice fosters confidence and competence in negotiations, making it a transformative component of their education.
This course explores leadership responsibilities through various simulations, assessments, and case studies. The coursework focuses on enhancing teamwork, collaboration, and working across boundaries within the supply chain. This interactive class develops the skills and competencies necessary to create and sustain dynamic teamwork and integrate effective leadership and decision-making. You will better understand the factors that influence decision-making effectiveness and impact team member participation.
This course equips you with essential tools to create and lead high-performance teams. You will learn to apply research-backed principles to assemble teams capable of sustained excellence in achieving meaningful and challenging objectives. This course’s practical approach ensures you can drive team success in any professional setting, making the knowledge and skills you gain invaluable assets for your career growth.
In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of marketing strategy and the goals of a marketing team, focusing on B2B models in addition to the challenges of integrating effective marketing into strategic initiatives at the enterprise level. Upon completing the course, you will have a strong understanding of how to work effectively with a marketing team, how the function supports a company’s profitable growth, and the broad areas of specialization in the field.
Learn how to develop and deploy a strategic sourcing plan. Past class teams have developed strategic sourcing plans for categories of spend such as: computer processing units, lift equipment for ski resorts, packaging for grocery stores, and sourcing of aircraft for airlines. We’ll use real-world case studies to understand how large corporations such as Boeing, SpaceX, and Amazon develop their strategic approaches to critical spending categories. In understanding the Category Management process, students gain the skills to reduce supply chain cost, reduce supply chain risk, and improve products and services.
In this class, you will learn how to develop decision support models using quantitative analysis tools, including linear programming, decision analysis, and simulation. After completing this class, you will develop hands-on experiences in building decision support models in Excel spreadsheets and gain essential skills to derive managerial insights from complicated mathematical modeling and analysis.
In this course, you will learn to analyze organizations in terms of processes and to spot opportunities to reduce cost and time in your workflows. The capacity management concepts and optimization tools covered in this class employ the latest technologies and are foundational to Operations Management across industries from manufacturing and online retail to software development and cloud computing.
Learn the forecasting techniques to understand the market demand for products in the supply chain. This course provides a comprehensive overview of tools and methods used to efficiently manage inventory of SKUs with varying characteristics. These tools will be widely used in analyzing supply chains in practice.
This course focuses on managing complex projects and develops students’ ability to successfully plan, schedule, and monitor these projects. Risk management is a consistent theme throughout the course. We also discuss new approaches that are critically important to many organizations, including the optimal design of contracts in decentralized projects and Agile and Scrum project management.
Students in this class will master the fundamentals of Lean Six Sigma, focusing on eliminating inefficiencies and improving quality. They will explore the seven deadly wastes, value stream mapping, various quality management tools, single-piece flow, and the DMAIC process with practical applications that drive operational excellence in supply chains and various office environments.
This course provides a comprehensive understanding of a firm’s strategy, including how it compares to but differs from related concepts such as business models. We examine the business holistically from the perspective of the firm’s primary strategist, the Chief Executive Officer. This course enhances students’ abilities to align their efforts with their organization’s core priorities and equips them with the language and concepts necessary to attain a competitive advantage in the workplace and propel their careers forward.
In this course, you will learn to apply advanced data analytics techniques—drawn from machine learning, data mining, and data analysis—to real business scenarios, equipping you with the skills to leverage Big Data effectively. Through hands-on experience with tools including R, Radiant, and Tableau, you will develop the ability to critically assess data, identify opportunities for analytics, and create value in diverse business contexts. This course prepares you to become a data-savvy manager capable of leading analytics teams and making informed data-driven decisions.
In this course, you will learn to manage and optimize the supply chain of any organization, with a focus on navigating the complexities of global competition and technological advancements. Through the exploration of strategic and operational issues, you will develop the skills to align operations strategy with customer value propositions, implement effective supply chain strategies, and optimize supply chain networks. This course prepares you to tackle the challenges of modern supply chain management, particularly in high-tech industries, equipping you with the tools to drive efficiency and success in a global marketplace.
In this course, you’ll gain a deep understanding of sustainability and ESG (Environmental and Social Governance) within supply chains, learning how to assess risks, balance costs, and navigate complex regulations. These skills are highly applicable in today’s industry, where businesses are racing to adopt greener practices and meet consumer and regulatory demands. You’ll also develop technical skills in data collection, verification, and sustainability reporting, culminating in building a corporate sustainability report based on real-world scenarios, making this a crucial course for future supply chain managers.
In this course, you will master SQL, one of the essential tools for analytics professionals, learning how to retrieve and analyze data from relational databases. Through a hands-on group project, you’ll apply SQL to real-world datasets, generating valuable insights while gaining experience with tools including Excel, Tableau, Python, or R for data visualization. This project not only strengthens your technical skills in SQL but also challenges your creativity in data mining and presenting your findings.
In this MSCM project-based course, you will work on solving unique real-world business challenges tailored to the needs of individual companies. Students will link the supply chain to specific business questions through a real-world project. You will gain key skills in project management, research, analytical thinking, and collaboration as you navigate varying degrees of data access, ambiguity, and interaction with project sponsors. This course is crucial for building hands-on experience with quantitative and qualitative problem-solving, preparing you to tackle diverse business scenarios in your career.
The Leader Series brings real-world, state-of-the-art supply chains into the classroom. Leading supply chain professionals discuss current issues, practices, and solutions, giving the students unique opportunities to ask questions and make connections. You will get a clearer picture of supply chain organizations, practices, and trends, and be introduced to professionals who can serve as role models and mentors.