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

• Manufacturing outsourcing and offshoring
• Dynamics of quality performance, ISO 9000 Certification
• Empirical Research in Operations Management
• Operations strategy
• 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 within manufacturing firms, and has one working paper studying the drivers of hospital quality.

In addition, he has an emerging research stream, funded by an NSF grant in 2011, on the drivers of outsourcing and offshoring strategies in a high-tech industry, and their effects on short- and long-term performance. 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.

One of his papers, Quality Risk in Offshoring, was a finalist for the Chan Hahn best paper award at the Academy of Management conference. 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 and 2011 Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings. He received Fisher College of Business’s 2011 “Pace Setter” award for research. 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 Data Analysis class for working professional MBAs, and also teaches an MBA elective called “Global Sourcing” which he created in 2007. For the sourcing class, 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.