MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — The COVID-19 pandemic made consumers realize the importance of supply chain management and the role the field plays in products on store shelves, and Middle Tennessee State University’s supply chain management program has long prepared students and alumni for the high-demand field.  

Richard Tarpey, director of the Center for Supply Chain Management and Sustainability and a professor in the Jones College of Business, appeared on the January edition of MTSU’s television magazine program “Out of the Blue” with host and vice president of marketing and communications, Andrew Oppmann, to discuss supply chain management and its importance.

“Supply chain management is essentially the management of everything in a business from the procurement of raw materials to the point the customer receives the product or the service,” Tarpey explained.

“It used to be called operations back in the ’70s and ’80s. Now we specifically refer to the topics as supply chain, which most people really didn’t have much concept of until COVID-19, of course, when people couldn’t find their goods and their toilet paper, suddenly everybody realized, ‘hey, supply chain is important.’ It’s what gets the products to the shelves.”

Watch the full interview segment below.

Tarpey said that MTSU supply chain management students and alums have high job placement rates locally in Middle Tennessee due to its location.  

“MTSU has the distinct advantage of being in the Middle Tennessee area,” he explained. “The statistic is 65 percent of the U.S. population lives within a 12-hour drive to Nashville, so that entices hundreds of distribution centers. You see them all along Interstate 24 and Interstate 840; there are manufacturing and transportation companies. All of those companies are hiring students out of our programs.”

Tarpey said MTSU’s supply chain management program is built by design with one goal in mind.

“Our goal, of course, is that our students walk out the door, and they’re able to jump into a position and not spend six months learning, but actually contributing as soon as they get hired at a company. That’s our goal,” he said.

In March, the annual supply chain summit will be held at MTSU.

“This year’s conference theme is going to be on cargo and package theft, which is a more and more prevalent topic for supply chains, whether it be at the last mile, your package getting stolen from your doorstep, stolen out of the van that delivers it to your doorstep, or even cargo theft on the railroads,” Tarpey said.

“So, products and materials are getting stolen from the plant and throughout the entire supply chain. We’re going to focus on preventing and looking at what mechanisms are available to reduce what we call shrinkage, which, of course, costs money to a lot of folks.”

MTSU has also been named the exclusive university partner of the Home Delivery World Conference, which will be held in Nashville and attracts thousands of participants each year. MTSU is also the exclusive university sponsor of the Transportation and Logistics Council Conference.

“The beauty of both of those sponsorships is we have the ability to bring students into those conferences; they’ll get to sit in the sessions, learn in the education sessions and then help out with the conference. Most importantly, for us, they’ll make those networking connections,” Tarpey said.

To learn more about MTSU’s supply chain management program, visit https://www.mtsu.edu/program/supply-chain-management-b-b-a/.

Ways to watch, listen

• “Out of the Blue” is available anytime on the university’s YouTube channel, the True Blue TV channel, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

• It also airs on Murfreesboro cable Channel 9 daily at 6 a.m., 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; NewsChannel5+ at 6:30 p.m. Sundays; WKRN+ at 7 p.m. Thursdays and noon Sundays; and streamed on the MTSU Jazz Network through WMOT.org at 7 a.m. on the first Sunday of each month; and on other cable outlets in Middle Tennessee, so check local listings.

• It is also available as a podcast on iTunes and Google Play and as individual interview segments on Spotify at https://spoti.fi/453hxg3.

Watch previous episodes of “Out of the Blue” at https://mtsunews.com/out-of-the-blue.

— DeAnn Hays (deann.hays@mtsu.edu)