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Operations Management

The Doctoral Program in Operations Management (OM) at the Ivey Business School is designed to prepare students for an engaging and enriching career in conducting meaningful scholarly-based research and teaching in leading schools of business administration.

The Doctoral Program in OM at the Ivey Business School has a strong track-record of exceptional first job placements in Top business schools around the world, including Georgia Tech, IE Business School, HEC Montreal, and many others.

The faculty members comprising this group include Dave Barrett, Jury Gualandris, Fraser Johnson, Rob Klassen, Deishin Lee, Larry Menor, Jason Nguyen, and Gal Raz. Their work is published in the top journals in the Operations and Technology Management disciplines, including Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Management Science, Production and Operations Management, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Operations Research, and Academy of Management Journal.

The OM group has strong, important research collaborations with top universities and researchers around the world, including MIT, Arizona State University (CASN-RA), University College Dublin, Indiana University, Strathclyde University and Erasmus RSM School of Business, among others.

OM deals with the planning, control and improvement/innovation of the operational system that transforms inputs into outputs and enables value realization for and from customers. OM also deals with the emergence and capable functioning of supply chains as complex adaptive systems that span industries and countries. As such, students will be exposed to, and critically examine, both foundational and recent scholarly developments spanning a wide array of tactical and strategic issues underlying how work gets done in the firm and across firms in order to develop their own theoretical and practical insights on relevant OM topics. While improved decision making and action based upon rigorous empirical science is the primary focus and interest of the OP discipline group's faculty, students will also be introduced to relevant analytical/axiomatic modeling approaches and interdisciplinary theorization that may be informative to the scrutiny of the OM topics.

Students take the full spectrum of Doctoral Program and OM special field offerings; on occasion, students may be encouraged to register and complete courses offered by other Ivey discipline groups and UWO faculties that may be salient to their specific program of study and individual scholarly development. For example, those courses related to advanced statistical and econometrical techniques, network analysis and any relevant other. Other aspects of the program are tailored to fit the student’s own research, teaching and professional interests and requirements.

Areas of Research Focus

  • Sustainable supply chain management
  • Operations strategy
  • Managing production and service systems and technologies
  • Systematic operational improvement and innovation approaches

PhD Student Opportunities

The doctoral program in Operations Management welcomes applications from qualified candidates with the following research interests:

Sustainable Supply Chain Management:

  • Developing ESG transparency and accountability in extended supply chains (Professors Jury Gualandris and Gal Raz)
  • Tackling waste through sustainable and circular operations (Professors Deishin Lee and Jury Gualandris)
  • Tackling behavioral biases to improve individual and firms' sustainable practices (Professors Jason Nguyen and Gal Raz)
  • Remanufacturing and recycling strategies and innovation in competitive settings (Professors Jason Nguyen and Gal Raz)
  • Environmental regulation and its implications on supply chains’ environmental innovation decisions (Professors Jason Nguyen and Gal)
  • Government regulation and firms' action to increase electrification of transportation systems and electrical vehicle adoption (Professor Gal Raz)

Operational Systems Design and Functioning:

  • Big Data-enabled processing, coordinative and learning capabilities (Professor Larry Menor)

Interdisciplinary Reseach with  Strategy, Accounting, Information Systems and Sustainability

  • To examine how multiple actors address collective action issues and promote systemic transformation in food supply chains, focusing on on how farmers and actors of the food chain interact with each other and develop communities of practices to define rules of interaction, agree on common food production principles, and promote sustainable change (Professor Jury Gualandris).

Discipline Coordinator

Gal Raz

Associate Professor, Operations Management & Sustainability

Gal Raz is an associate professor of Operations Management and Sustainability and a fellow at the Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management at Ivey. He received his Ph.D. in business and a master's degree focusing on public policy from Stanford University. His research centres on supply-chain management and sustainable operations, with a special focus on pricing, remanufacturing, innovation and government environmental regulations. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as POM, Management Science, and Decision Sciences and top business magazines such as Strategy and Business, the Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post. The Impact of the Raz’s research extends to multiple cases and articles in leading business magazines, and over 30 media interviews and news stories. He serves on the editorial board of POM and as a referee for Management Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM).

Dr. Raz has more than 20 years of experience teaching operations, SCM, sustainability and innovation at Undergraduate, MBA and EE programs, at leading business schools such as Ivey, Darden, Kellogg, Technion, and AGSM. During the last two decades he developed many courses and almost 20 cases that sold over 75,000 copies worldwide. His course materials won several awards with the “Eastman Tritan” case winning the 2013 INFORMS case competition, and his sustainability materials and courses helping Darden win the Sustainability Curriculum Page Award in 2012. Based on his work, he was invited to give multiple tutorials on teaching OPS and SCM at both POMs and INFORMS. Dr. Raz also leads workshops for faculty members around the world on teaching the case method and writing with cases. 

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