Burak Kazaz is the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor of Teaching Excellence, the highest honor given at Syracuse University for outstanding achievements as a teacher and scholar. He is also a Whitman Teaching Fellow, and is the recipient of the first-ever Teaching Innovation Award at Syracuse University’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management. His teaching experience includes undergraduate, MBA and Executive MBA courses, and Ph.D. seminars on operations management, global supply chain management, and logistics.
An enthusiastic supporter of experiential learning, Dr. Kazaz employs student consulting projects that provide free consulting to businesses and experience for his students. For the contributions made in such projects, Dr. Kazaz received several awards from companies, including IBM, British Petroleum, and Procter & Gamble.
At Syracuse University, Dr. Kazaz teaches:
- A doctoral seminar on supply chain management that focuses on a risk management perspective,
- MBA, iMBA, and undergraduate global supply chain management: a case-based course that integrates concepts from supply chain operations, financial risk management, global marketing, and tax accounting.
- A design thinking approach used in designing scalable supply chains in order to stimulate the growth of small and medium-sized firms.
Principles of supply chain management: This is the introductory supply chain course taught simultaneously with the principles of finance and marketing. In this course, Dr. Kazaz uses his unpublished narrative/ manuscript called “The Mambo,” which is a collection of the stories of seven fictitious characters who experience challenges at their organizations. The stories enable students to envision the importance of the topic they learn before arriving the class.
Dr. Kazaz is the author of a highly popular unpublished book manuscript called The Mambo. The book is used in teaching supply chain and operations management. Here is a sample from the book:
The Mambo: An Integrated Series of Short Cases for Teaching the Principles of Supply Chain and Operations Management [download the first two cases].
Dr. Kazaz also developed a game called “Supplying Hoop Dreams.” This game builds on the popular exercise called The Beer Distribution Game, and extends it to include multiple retailers (competing to get the insufficient stock), multiple suppliers with varying lead-times (teaching the importance of synchronizing the flow of goods). You can download the game from the link below:
Supplying Hoop Dreams Game [download].