Abstract
Roger W. Schmenner is Professor Emeritus of Operations Management and the former Randall L. Tobias Chair at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. He retired from Indiana University in December 2010 after 24 years there. His academic career began as an undergraduate economics major at Princeton (1969) and continued with doctoral studies, again in economics, at Yale (1973). His earlier professorial appointments were at the Harvard Business School and the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. While at Indiana University he accepted three separate visiting appointments to IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland. Schmenner is a Fellow of POMS and a Past President (1997), responsible for starting the POMS website.
The stereotypical life of a retiree was not for him and in January 2011 he and his wife repaired to the University of Cambridge where he assumed an eighteen‐month appointment as Visiting Academic at the Judge Business School. It was there, despite the temptations of Cambridge pubs and college dinners, that he was able to complete and publish Getting and Staying Productive: Applying Swift Even Flow to Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
This book is essentially, although not limited to, a compendium of his research and teaching contributions combined with consulting and academic management experience gained throughout his 40‐year professional career. The concept of Swift Even Flow (SEF) is spelled out in detail and applied to a myriad of management situations in manufacturing and service settings. It reflects a career‐long fascination with productivity improvement and economic history. He proves to be a spell binding storyteller of both historical and current examples that serve to encourage executives and students of management to apply SEF to their own challenges.
Schmenner is best known for his contributions to the fields of industry location, productivity enhancement, service operations, and manufacturing strategy and has published widely in both academic and practitioner‐oriented journals. His work on industry location was, in fact, his bridge between economics and operations management, culminating in his 1982 book, Making Business Locations Decisions (Prentice‐Hall). Indeed, the quality and impact of much of his work, particularly his empirical work with large databases, has rested in his ability to demonstrate its relevance to practice.
Throughout his professorial career Schmenner has been recognised as a consummate teacher, winning no fewer than 25 competitive teaching awards. Over the years innumerable colleagues have benefitted from his mentorship in developing their own pedagogical skills. The profession has also benefitted from his three textbooks. Production/Operations Management: From the Inside Out, first published in 1981, offered a novel approach to the application of theory to practice and went to five editions. This was followed by Service Operations Management in 1995. His Plant and Service Tours in Production/Operations Management, first published in 1986, with a fifth edition appearing in 1998, was a unique contribution. In the days prior to inexpensive video, this text provided instructors with the opportunity of bringing the factory or service operation into the classroom. The plant and service tours described in the book overcame the logistical nightmare of taking large numbers of students on “factory visits” and helped immeasurably in the development of skills necessary to size up a plant or service operation.
Bringing practice to the classroom stimulated his case research agenda and he proved to be a prolific case writer with several, such as “Searle Medical Instruments Group”, “International Plow” and “Stocker and Driscoll” regarded as “golden oldies “that are still relevant today. However he was not just an author of cases, he championed innovation in the teaching of cases, demonstrating the value of shorter, more succinct materials, particularly in executive education.
Schmenner has proven to be a devoted institution builder as well as an effective academic administrator. During the last sixteen years of his tenure he served consecutively as Department Chair, Associate Dean for the Kelley School's Indianapolis operations, and finally Chief of Staff for the Chancellor of Indiana University's Indianapolis campus. Among his achievements during this period, as Dean, he oversaw the creation of the Kelley Direct Online MBA that US News and World Report ranks as #1 in the USA and as Chief of Staff, he managed the master planning process for the campus of 30,000 students and 20 different schools.
He and his wife, Barbie, live in Carmel, Indiana. They have two grown sons. He is an active member of their church, singing in the choir (bass) and playing clarinet in the orchestra. He is an avid and eclectic sports fan, having followed the Orioles and the Colts since his youth in Baltimore, and more recently, the English Premier League football club Arsenal (The Gunners). He is an ardent golfer and a lousy skier.
