Faculty - Business Connection

Through the College's Faculty-Business Connection, faculty work alongside executives and employees, sharing their expertise to solve actual problems for business and government.   Businesses benefit from our faculty's leading-edge thinking and research and students benefit from faculty who gain an indepth and practical understanding of emerging trends in business.

Here are a few examples of Faculty-Business Connection programs:

• MeadWestvaco - Susan Lightle, professor of accountancy applied both her auditing expertise and French-speaking skills to assist the former MeadWestvaco company in an audit of their plant in Chateauroux, France.   Dr. Lightle also helped evaluate controls over the company's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System. 
  
• Teradata, a division of NCR - Robert J. Sweeney, professor of finance and financial services, worked as a member of Teradata's Business Impact Modeling Team.  Dr. Sweeney helped to develop finanical forecasts and quantitfy the value associated with the Teradata product.
  
• Reynolds & Reynolds - Thomas Traynor, professor of economics, joined forces with Reynolds executives on a three-month project to develop a lifetime customer relationship value model that illustrates how automotive retailers improve their profitability.   Reynolds has also used the model to demostrate to financial analysts and investors that the company's performance is largely independent from the cycical nature of new car sales.
  
• Bank One and AT&T - Nadia Saunders, professor of information systems and operations management, completed a research project for Bank One and AT&T Consulting Services on coordinated planning and forecasting systems.  Her research also led to several publications in leading research journals. 
  
• Shore-to-Shore - The Institute for Business Integrity, under the leadership of Joseph Petric, professor of management,  provided guidance to help Shore-to-Shore, a locally based, multinational company, gain social accountability certification, giving the company a competitive edge in the global garment industry. 
  
• Mound Advanced Technology Center - Scott Williams, professor of management, is currently working with Mound officials on a strategic plan for redeveloping this unique technology resource for the region.