John Gray

Assistant Professor of Operations

Education

Ph.D., Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina
MBA, Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest University
BA, Dartmouth College
BE, Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College

Areas of Expertise

• The relationship between organizational/geographic boundaries and quality risk
• Dynamic quality management
• Antecedents and consequences of outsourcing and offshoring
• Empirical research in operations management
• Global sourcing

Biography

An award-winning researcher and teacher, Dr. Gray studies the hard-to-measure and long-term performance implications of outsourcing and offshoring, with a current focus on quality risk. As part of this research, he examines the techniques buyers can use to effectively manage quality in outsourced production under a given set of conditions. He also studies the dynamic nature of internal quality management, primarily within manufacturing.

His research has received several awards and recognitions. He received Fisher College of Business's 2011 "Pace Setter" award for research. Two of his papers have been finalists for the OM Division's Chan Hahn best paper award at the Academy of Management conference (in 2009 and 2012). He is co-PI on an NSF grant funded in the summer of 2011 which proposed to study the performance implications of outsourcing and offshoring in the semiconductor industry. His dissertation, Essays on Manufacturing Outsourcing, was awarded the Juran Fellowship from the Juran Center at the University of Minnesota, and was also the winner of the Decision Science Institute's 2007 Elwood S. Buffa Doctoral Dissertation Competition His work has been published or is forthcoming in Organization Science, the Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Decision Sciences, the Journal of Supply Chain Management, Quality Management Journal and in the 2009, 2011 and 2012 Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings. He serves on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, and the Journal of Supply Chain Management, and co-chaired the 2010 empirical research track at the POMS conference in Vancouver.

He teaches the core MBA Data Analysis class, and also teaches an MBA elective called "Global Sourcing" which he created in 2007. For the latter, he was awarded "Outstanding Working Professional MBA Elective Professor" by the students in 2010. A student project from this class led to a co-authored case (Scotts Miracle-Gro: The Spreader Sourcing Decision) which has been adopted at numerous top business schools and is one of Ivey Publishing's twenty best-selling cases across all disciplines. In 2008, he led a group of MBA students on a "Global Sourcing" elective trek to China, in which they visited contract manufacturers, a contract research organization, and the Asia sourcing office of a Fortune 50 firm.

Prior to pursuing a Ph.D. Dr. Gray worked at Procter & Gamble in operations management for eight years. During his tenure, he implemented a plant-wide daily management system still in use, and as department manager greatly improved the quality performance of a 50-person, multi-million unit anti-perspirant/deodorant making operation.