The College of Business has tightened its ship, combining three independent programs into one cooperative department, and officials say that so far, the results have been successful.

The department of Logistics, Operations and Management Information Systems (LOMIS) opened in July 1998 and currently has an enrollment of about 800 students, a total fueled by “rapid growth” in MIS, said Michael Crum, chairman of LOMIS.

“We are unique and envied by a lot of schools for what we have done,” he said. “We feel we are better structured.”

Crum said one of the reasons for this combination was that “[the programs] tend to have more in common.” The entire College of Business faculty had a hand in making the decision to create LOMIS.

The college relocated faculty from all three disciplines to a central area in Carver Hall, said Tony Hendrickson, associate professor of logistics, operations and MIS.

“It allows us as professors to be more closely linked with colleagues that have a similar relationship in business,” he said.

The departmental restructuring was in part driven by businesses. Crum said potential employers have always looked for logistics students with more production skills and production students with more logistics skills.

Hendrickson said LOMIS is a department with three functional areas and three distinct majors. Students cannot receive a degree in LOMIS, only in one or more of the three majors it combines: transportation/logistics, production operations management and MIS.

The underlying idea for the department was to realign student learning with a portion of the business cycle known as supply-chain management. The purpose of supply-chain management is to connect organizations that buy or sell to and from each other, Hendrickson said.

Transportation/logistics is responsible for getting the raw materials in and the finished goods out on schedule. Production operations management coordinates the production of those goods. MIS links all the technology involved.

The LOMIS department allows all three functional areas to work more closely together, Crum said. “We are looking for ways to be more innovative with those three curricula.”