UCLA PGPX Classroom : Entrepreneurship and Operations Management (20th to 25th June, 2022)
This classroom module in UCLA PGPX focuses on further enhancing your learning from the online modules by focusing on the most important aspects in the classroom. The UCLA Faculty will help you appreciate the nuanced aspects of identifying an interesting idea and developing it further. Prof. Kumar Rajaram will then spend time in enhancing your execution skills by first helping you appreciate the intricacies of Operations Management and teaching the basic concepts and then helping apply to those to manage effective operations. The final outcome would be your growth as an entrepreneurial leader who understands that operational excellence and execution makes the real difference towards long term success.
Faculty
Prof. Kumar Rajaram
Kumar Rajaram is professor of decisions, operations and technology management and the Ho-Su Wu Chair in Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Rajaram’s current research interests include improving operations in the health care industry, nonprofit sector and process manufacturing sector, including food processing, pharmaceuticals and the petrochemical industry. He has focused on developing analytical models of complicated systems with a strong emphasis on practical implementation.
Rajararm’s work has been published in leading research journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Marketing Science and Production and Operations Management. He has been awarded the Eric and E Juline Faculty Excellence in Research Award at UCLA Anderson.
Rajaram developed a new control paradigm called “Robust Process Control” to increase the productivity of large-scale industrial processes. By focusing on the design and control of these processes in operational environments, this technique has resulted in four-fold increases in productivity in several types of industrial processes. These methods have been implemented at several process companies worldwide. For this work, he has been recognized by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) as a Franz Edelman Laureate for outstanding applications of operations research and management science techniques to practice. He has also developed techniques to better balance supply with demand for products with short life cycles and highly unpredictable demand. This work has been applied at several large fashion retailers in Europe and North America and has resulted in substantial improvements to profitability at these sites. He has also worked in developing analytical models to improve planning for HIV/AIDS screening, testing and care at the Veterans Administration. In addition, he has worked at improving patient flows at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and has developed models to improve staff and operating room assignments for surgeries at this hospital.
Courses
At the UCLA Anderson, Rajaram teaches the MBA core course on operations and technology management, various executive education courses and doctoral level courses on operations management and models for operations design, planning and control.
Education:
Ph.D. Operations Management, 1998, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
M.A. Managerial Science and Applied Economics, 1997, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
M.S. Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, 1993, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
M.Sc. Mathematics, with Honors, 1991, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India
B.E. Electrical and Electronics Engineering, with Honors, 1991, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India
Prof. George Abe
Professor
George Abe is a lecturer and Faculty Director of the Strategic Management Research (SMR) Program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. His teaching responsibilities include entrepreneurship, business plan development and field study program advisories. SMR is the field study program, required of all Executive MBA students.
He was Business Development Manager for the UCLA Office of Intellectual Property, which is responsible for patent protection and commercialization of UCLA research.
Previously, he was a venture partner with Palomar Ventures, a VC firm in Santa Monica, California. Before Palomar, he was a Business Development Manager at Cisco Systems. Prior to that he was with Infonet Services Corporation (NYSE:IN, now BT) where he designed Infonet’s IP data service.
From 1998 until 2006, he was a member of the board of directors of Switchcore AB, a publicly traded fabless semiconductor designer in Sweden. He has also held board of director positions with various startup companies and not-for-profit organizations.
He is the author of Residential Broadband, which presents an analysis of high-speed residential networking, published by Cisco Press.
Education
B.A. Mathematics, UCLA
M.S. Business, Quantitative Methods, UCLA
Learning Objectives:
By the end of the in-class UCLA module in UCLA PGPX, you will be able to:
- Understand various elements of entrepreneurship
- Appreciate better the challenges of becoming an entrepreneur
- Develop your strategy and operational template for pursuing entrepreneurship
- Understand the aspects of fund raising, acquiring customer and generating revenues for your venture
- Develop an appreciation of the challenges of scaling up
- Understand the importance of good execution with operational excellence
- Understand and apply the basics of designing a good process
- Build an appreciation of what makes great organizations work well – the execution DNA
- Analyze a good operations management strategy
- Assess process design using established tools and techniques
- Develop into an execution oriented, entrepreneurial manager and leader
Classroom Methods & Schedule
The classroom module will use various exercises, case studies, team assignment and class discussion to bring alive the complexities in the subject areas. It is required that you go through all the required cases as well as pre-reads and prepare for the session before the class. It will be greatly beneficial for you and the other participants to go through the material provided so that the discussion can be rich, and help clarify details with the faculty members during the in-class session.
Complete schedule will be shared soon.
Support
Please email [email protected] for any support required with respect to the program, course or platform.