UO business students enter the real world of Kettle Foods
Kettle Foods, the Oregon-grown producer of natural chips and snacks, had a problem with big bricks-and-mortar implications. A team of students from University of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business had an uncommon interest in material handling.
A coupling of the Kettle Foods problem and the students from Nagesh Murthy's decisions sciences class resulted in a 15-page project that Murthy rates as the best ever in his 300-level undergraduate course. "Their solution was very simple and practical," Murthy says. "These kids went way beyond what (Kettle Foods officials) thought they’d get."
The boiled-down version of the potato chip maker's dilemma is that its warehouse is a 3.5-mile drive south of its Salem production facility. It's an inefficiency that costs the company $300,000 per year.
But the warehouse lease expires in 2012, and Kettle Foods has access to a parcel of land adjacent to its potato chip plant. So the six-student team had a mission: come up with the most efficient design for a new warehouse next-door to the production facility, and determine the construction project's feasibility.
"There was no outline in any of our courses on how to tackle the project, or even where to begin — I mean, we were designing a building," says John Fischer, who tackled the project last fall term along with fellow undergraduates Erika Bulay, Patrick Burton, JD Mesa, Allyson Scott and Christine Amanatidis. "There were no 'How to design a warehouse' chapters in our (business administration) and management classes.”
In the end, the students came up with a plan for an 80,000-square-foot warehouse that would hold 8,100 pallets of Kettle Foods products. It also called for a conveyor to transport pallets of materials directly from the production area next-door, for different depths in the rows of stored pallets to account for the turnover rates of various products, and for loading docks on opposite sides of the building — with staging areas in-between to minimize wasted space.
Company President Tim Fallon says student projects always energize his business and inspire employees to look at problems from new directions. "The students bring a fresh set of eyes, intelligence and enthusiasm to tackle a variety of issues that impact daily operations," he says.
Murthy lines up about 30 real-life projects each year for his decisions sciences classes. He says his students get invaluable experience by playing in the arena of everyday business, and he commends companies such as Kettle Foods for "providing the sandbox."
"For me, the biggest thing to let (students) know is how different the real world setting can be from the classroom setting," Murthy says.
For team member Allyson Scott, those differences played out in the areas between black and white. She says the team quickly realized its project could go in multiple directions. "For awhile, we were getting caught up on creating the best design, but we soon discovered that there are trade-offs for every solution," Scott says. "Eventually, we had to stop obsessing the details and just commit on a good design."
