Hannah Stolze
![Hannah Stolze, Ph.D.](/sites/g/files/ecbvkj1971/files/2024-05/Stolze%20-%20Fall%2022%20-%20Headshot.jpg)
Getting product to people—the fundamentals of the supply chain, and a baseline for Hannah Stolze’s nationally recognized work. Stolze came to Baylor last year as the inaugural William E. Crenshaw Endowed Chair in Supply Chain Management. She focuses on transformative supply chain management, informed by her Christian faith. In this Baylor Connections, Stolze takes listeners inside important supply chain concepts and what it means to offer dignity to everyone involved in the supply chain.
Transcript
Derek Smith:
Hello, and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in-depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more discussing important topics in higher education, research, and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we are talking about the supply chain with Hannah Stolze.
Dr. Hannah Stolze serves as the inaugural William E. Crenshaw Endowed Chair and Supply Chain Management at Baylor, a leading supply chain scholar, researcher, and author. She came to Baylor from Wheaton College and Lipscomb University last year in this new role. A veteran, her time in the US Army was the catalyst for an eventual academic career. Her research includes partnerships with the Department of Defense and leading private organizations like Frito-Lay, BNSF Railway, and more.
Well, we hear a lot about the supply chain in the news. Now we get to talk about that with you. Hannah Stolze, thanks so much for joining us on the program today.
Hannah Stolze:
It's great to be here. Thanks, Derek.
Derek Smith:
Great to have you here. You joined the Baylor faculty last fall. I mean, you officially announced last year and then joined the Baylor faculty last fall, so fill in the blank for us. Your first year at Baylor has been what?
Hannah Stolze:
Fantastic. I would definitely say this year has been you hit the ground running and just working with wonderful colleagues and students and industry with our advisory council. It's just been a really wonderful year. I'm excited to be here.
Derek Smith:
Hit the ground running. I imagine pretty busy kind of launching a chair position like this.
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, absolutely. Right off the bat, we're launching global projects, both research and student projects, and coming off of being a Fulbright scholar, I really care about having that student engagement globally for supply chain for sure. It's essential.
Derek Smith:
So you tell people that you work in the supply chain. Are there common questions or responses you get and have those changed in the last four years at all?
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, I would say essentially 2020 to 2022 is what can you do to fix it, which of course, from the classroom, that's hardly what we do as professors. And also I think, see, people are always confused, maybe not confused ... The supply chain is a little bit like the story of the cobbler and the shoes and the elves came in at night and made all the shoes. We go to the store and we expect product to be there. And I think definitely the last four years have given people visibility to our dependence on global supply chains. And so I think there's much more awareness today than there was before, but the fix-it problem is always front and center. I'm glad to move away from toilet paper and vaccinations though.
Derek Smith:
Visiting with Dr. Hannah Stolze. So you touched on it, but could you give us a little bit of a supply chain 101. Maybe if you're going into a high school class and trying to let them know a little bit about what this is, what would you tell them?
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, simply put, supply chain management is about balancing supply and demand. So in practicality, that means you need to have a plan. You need to understand the market, what demand is for the product that you make. You need to be able to source enough materials to make product and then deliver them to the marketplace. So that's the basic score model or the plan, source, make, deliver. That really makes up all the different ways you look at supply chain strategy.
Derek Smith:
And then there's all ... You talk about the elves making the shoes. There's what the trains, the planes, the ships, the boats, the people who are all working in the background on this.
Hannah Stolze:
Absolutely, yeah. You have flows of information, money, products, everything's moving globally around the world between organizations and people. It's a very exciting space to work in.
Derek Smith:
Well, this has been a space you've been working in for a while now. So before we really get to your background, let's talk about this role. You're in here, the William E. Crenshaw Endowed Chair in supply chain management at Baylor. You came here for that role. What was this position created to accomplish?
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, this position, I think endowed chairs and in general are created to give faculty the opportunity to focus on thought leadership and carving out spaces at Baylor where hopefully we're forward-thinking about how can we lead in our fields from an ethical business perspective, and then uniquely from Baylor with a Christian worldview. And so I think the Crenshaw chair is an interesting role for me in particular coming out of a lot of food and retail supply chain research. Obviously, the Crenshaw family was Publix, it was also in grocery retail. And so there's a lot of alignment between thinking about how do we use best practices to meet people's needs in ways that are meaningful and dignifying.
Derek Smith:
So you've got research, you're working with students. As you said, people kind of want you to fix things. That's not necessarily what it is, but the actions that you kind of take as you start this off, what does that look like?
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, I think jumping in with this position, it's really looking at the research kind of side of things and how do we ask questions that are relevant to the supply chain academy in terms of the theories, which we won't talk about theory, don't worry. But also in industry, how do we ask questions that are going to position the research we're doing at Baylor to help guide our students in terms of how they're going to land in the marketplace as well, and the opportunities we're going to have to partner with industry from Baylor.
So I think there's a couple different pieces to how we do supply chain research and that most of the work we do is with companies. And so one of the big opportunities we have is to really engage strategically with different organizations in Texas, in the US and even globally to say, how do we do supply chain management in a way that creates economic development and global opportunity for our students who will be in management roles, but also with a trickle-down to the front line of global supply chain workers around the world.
Derek Smith:
We're visiting with Dr. Hannah Stolze here on Baylor Connections, so probably get a sense of it even just as you talk about it. But this particular role, why was it so appealing to you personally?
Hannah Stolze:
Absolutely. I think what, three years ago, I wouldn't have even imagined a position like this existed, and it's a really big deal. For the listeners that don't know what R1 is, it's a really big deal that Baylor got top research status because it actually moved Baylor from being a nationally known great reputation Christian school to being a nationally globally known research institution. And that was a huge draw to me personally, to move from the Midwest to Texas and to jump in into a place that not only wants to be Christian, but wants to be rigorously thoughtful about how we're Christian, and that's what the R1 status kind of does for Baylor, and it makes it a really great place to be.
Derek Smith:
Let's rewind a little bit. You were attracted to come be a part of this role, but you had a good dual role going on, a great dual role going on at Wheaton College and Lipscomb University. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing there and maybe how those were able to help set you up for this.
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, absolutely. So, Wheaton College, really the time there was super interesting going from ... I was at Florida State before, so going to Wheaton College, it was kind of an academic total opposite, but Wheaton is probably one of the best places I've ever worked in terms of theology and faith integration into the classroom and into kind of worldview and thinking for business.
So the time I had at Wheaton, I was able to launch a Center for Faith and Innovation, really thinking strategically about what does it mean to pursue business from a biblical perspective, from a Christian perspective. And I loved my time there. The opportunity at Lipscomb was really the space where I got to start thinking more specifically, what does it look like to apply this Christian worldview specifically in supply chain management? And so I think many Christians think that the ultimate way to serve God is in missions or in the traditional kind of full-time ministry.
But I definitely believe that if God calls us to serve him and love him and love and serve others, maybe our biggest opportunity is through how we show up every day in our workplaces. And so both of these opportunities at Wheaton and at Lipscomb gave me the opportunity to ... I got a master's in Bible while I was at Wheaton and on faculty there, and it gave me the opportunity to think more strategically, what should our worldview be and how do we bring that with us to work where we're going to be hopefully serving God with every day of our life, not just our Sunday morning worship practice.
Derek Smith:
So that would be your vocation and calling came together in the supply chain. And where did that interest begin for you? Where did that spark? When did that spark for you?
Hannah Stolze:
Absolutely. I don't think most young children say, I'm going to grow up and be a trucking professor or a warehousing professor. And so actually there was a couple different things happened simultaneously with timing. We don't choose when we're born, so it helps when your passions align with the era you live in.
Derek Smith:
Sure.
Hannah Stolze:
And so my undergrad was actually in international political economics in Mandarin. And when I kind of launched from home and started my academic student life, I did so as an enlisted soldier in the Army. And between learning Mandarin in the late nineties and enlisting in the Army, I had two different opportunities. Really, the Army was where I linguist qualified in Mandarin as a part of my job there. And working in political economics, it really opened my eyes to the global economy that we were in and certainly was shifting and changing in those years, in particular. So definitely my interest in supply chain. Through the Army, I actually ended up in ordinance, driving the trucks, doing the warehousing and loading explosives onto planes, trains, and railroads for the army anyway.
And I really kind of fell in love with the complexity of supply chain and the fun of the problem solving that happens every day on the job. So that was kind of my first intro. It was a lot of things happened all at once. And speaking some Mandarin in the late nineties definitely pushed me into that global space in terms of where the US was going with our global market as well.
Derek Smith:
So when you were working in logistics for the army, did you have any sense that you might someday take an academic turret or was that not even ... When did that come about for you?
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, I had no idea. And actually, while I was in the Army, I had three different occupational specialties. So it's super interesting. I started out in psychological operations really as a cultural analyst. So that was my macroeconomics. That was that space. And going into ordinance, I learned the trucking part, and then I finished up in broadcast journalism. And I think that really prepared me more than anything else for the classroom. How do you tell a story? How do you tell a good story? And it wasn't until after I'd gotten my MBA and I had worked in operations for a few years running operations for a small import company in St. Louis that I realized that I really wanted to get paid to think more. A lot of supply chain management is putting fires out every day. There's something that goes wrong globally, somewhere in the world every day, and if your supply chain is long, somewhere in the world, something's going to go wrong.
And it's super fun. But I also wanted to have the strategic side, and there's two ways that you can get paid to think you need 20 years of experience or a Ph.D. So I went the Ph.D. route and loved doing the research. As I was kind of pursuing the academic space, really fell in love with the classroom as well. And the space where you get to both develop knowledge and then deliver that knowledge hopefully to your academic peers, but also in the classroom and how you shape students for the supply chains they're going to work in the future.
Derek Smith:
Were there any other ways besides kind of nudging you towards your next career path that your time in the army shaped you? Are there things that you still look at now and think, boy, I've taken that away from my time there?
Hannah Stolze:
Gosh, there's nothing better to get the attention of a room to tell them that you know how to work explosives. So I would say at a low level, that was definitely always logistics and the supply chain academy is ... It's a great field to have that kind of hazah coming into a room. I think also being in SIOPs and moving into ordnance, it gave me a different perspective of where the US fits in the global economy and how ... not just the US as a nation, but how firms are positioned in the global supply chains of today. So when you want to move product around the world, it's not just about understanding how many widgets you need to deliver to Waco, Texas. It's about understanding all the components that go into that widget and where they come from. And most likely it's going to be China, it's going to be Mexico, it's going to be the other places that we're sourcing product from.
So I think that what the army did was it prepared me to have a very global perspective, a very finite local problems, and to understand that we don't exist in ... No man's an island. We don't exist without the rest of the global economy supporting our expectations of the products we have available every day.
Derek Smith:
This is Baylor Connections. We are visiting with Hannah, Stolze, the William E. Crenshaw, Endowed Chair in supply chain management at Baylor. You've touched on this as we've been talking, but I want to ask you again, you'll look at some of the challenges or questions in supply chain that really drive you, whether it's in this role or just generally, what are the ones, the questions that just kind of stick with you all the time that you're motivated to try to answer?
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, I think initially, I pursued supply chain management because I figured everybody, what better way to serve humanity than to figure out how to get things to people? It seems like a really admirable space to be in. I do think even ... As Christians, Matthew 25 has a call to how do you get food to the hungry and drinks to the thirsty, there's a call to this. One of the things that has always stood out to me, and I do empirical research, which means I work with companies. My research is typically supported and sponsored by organizations and I'm doing data collection within their supply chains. And one of the things that really struck me and shifted my trajectory and worldview was that there are so many ways in business that you can not just make money, but you can do good. So you can do really good things, you can make jobs better for the people that show up every day. You can make your products better for the consumers that are buying them and consuming them.
And you can think strategically about how you're moving your product, like the trains and trucks that you were talking about and the ships they go on. You can think strategically and say, how do we do this better today so that the next generation is inheriting a world that's good and has good things in it? I think one of the questions when I first got into it, I did it from more of a practical standpoint, but working with Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies, I was really struck by the fact that leaders in organizations really care about doing good and that they really are thinking about what are ways that we can run our business in a way that is good for society and good for the world? And I think that that has always resounded with me that this makes business better, both financially as well as the impact it has on people around it.
Derek Smith:
What does good for society and good for the world mean in terms of the people who are involved in the supply chain? And how much does that align with the idea of transformative supply chain management?
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, thanks for asking about that. Over the last few years, I've shifted from doing primarily sustainable or sustainability research or sustainable supply chain management research to broadening that. So when you think about sustainability, you're thinking about economic performance, environmental performance and social impact, social performance. The transformative research space actually broadens that to ... adds in another seven components or another four components to the original three to think about how does supply chain impact global economic development, how do supply chains impact economic development. All of these things are really important in business. And so the transformative space really looks at how do supply chain practices impact the health and well-being of individuals.
And so let me give you a really practical example. Okay, so if you think about a Fortune 500 company in the US, say they make $14 billion in revenue a year and they have 30,000 employees. Of the 30,000 employees, 20,000 of those employees will probably be frontline workers. That means working in their factories, working in their warehouses, working as truck drivers. So the majority of your organization will probably be frontline supply chain workers. And so that means that if you are thinking strategically as a leader of an organization, you can make choices about how you treat your employees, how you work with your suppliers, how you deliver products to your customers. You can make little choices that tweak the way that you do business to their benefit.
And I think this is a huge opportunity right now to not just ... We know how to do marketing well, we know how to sell products to people, we know how to deliver products to people. And I think the exciting space in supply chain research today is to say, how do we deliver good products? How do we move product well to the marketplace and how do we really do it in a way that blesses and dignifies the people that are in our ecosystems?
Derek Smith:
What are some of the fun ways you get to think about blessing and dignifying the people within those ecosystems?
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, there's tons of practical examples throughout supply chains to think about the dignity of work. I love an example. I worked pretty closely with Bill Pollard who was the CEO of ServiceMaster for years. And one of the things that they shifted for their frontline workers was actually just looking at how does a worker clean floors. And they realize that when you're bent over cleaning a floor, you're not making eye contact with anyone around you. You're almost like less than human. And so they actually made sure that they had standing mops so that when people were cleaning hospitals and industrial spaces, that when people were doing that kind of work, they were actually standing and can make eye contact and be engaging with people around them.
Another space in supply chain management that it's really huge is actually the safety space. So there's a lot of dangerous work in supply chains, whether it's rail yards or trucking, and having a perspective of safety in work is really important. So transformative supply chain research really looks at how do we do business in a way, how do we look at supply chain practices to include health and wellbeing of individuals.
Derek Smith:
As you described this, I think you paint that picture of how your faith integrates with your work in supply chain. And Baylor isn't the first faith-based organization you've been a part of, whether it's Lipscomb or Wheaton before this. But when you think about faith and supply chain, probably, is it bubbling just under the surface in a lot of ways, whether people know it or not?
Hannah Stolze:
I think so. And I don't think people realize how much Scripture and the Bible talks about supply chain practices. Nobody believes me, but then they do.
Derek Smith:
Yes. Well, give us some examples. Yeah.
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah. Perfect examples. And actually I think it's really fun. When you read the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, they are inventory books. If you get into Deuteronomy and Leviticus and Numbers, they're talking about temple inventory. And I love it. The first miracle that saved the world was really a warehousing miracle is when there was a huge famine in Egypt and Joseph had a ... That Pharaoh had a dream that Joseph interpreted to build a big warehouse, and it saved the whole world. That's Genesis 50, right?
So from the very beginning of the biblical story, we have this picture of God caring about how we get product to people because we need food, we need clothing, we need shelter. And actually, in Matthew 25, I love this passage again, Jesus is actually teaching on wisdom and what it looks like, and it has to do with getting product to people. Of course, I'm a wisdom buff. I really love Proverbs. I love wisdom literature, and all throughout Proverbs, it seems like the court literature of ancient Israel is really talking about how do you do business transactions, how do you source raw materials, how do you transform it and deliver it to your customers. Proverbs 31, I think is the opus of the entrepreneurial female, CEO running a textile supply chain. And all of the best practices today show up from a scripture 3000 years old. I love how much scripture can guide us in terms of how we think about supply chain strategy today.
Derek Smith:
That's pretty cool. Yeah, most of us aren't thinking about that.
Hannah Stolze:
I bet not.
Derek Smith:
Yes. But now we will, as we take a look at this, as we visit with Dr. Hannah Stolze here on Baylor Connections, and so we added the final few minutes of the program, thinking about training the next generation. What's the interest you find in your students in a concept like the supply chain? It's probably not something you think about when you're eight years old, but somewhere along the way it's capturing.
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah. The most exciting thing for me is students come into the supply chain space and they're really thinking about that first job, which is probably going to be an inventory analyst, or there'll maybe be a transportation buyer in some of those spaces, and to get them thinking about the impact you can have. It's one of the few fields where in your entry-level job, you can be sitting in a desk that has global impact and global contact.
So my first job out of undergrad was working in buying, and every day I was on the phone with factories in China and factories in India, and factories in Guatemala. And so I think where students can get excited is that they get to play a part in this global ecosystem, in this global economy that we're a part of today. And if you can get them to stop long enough to think about the impact of their individual small transactional choices, which really aren't that transactional in the long run, they can incrementally have a ripple effect in terms of their impact on people globally. Isn't that a cool space to be in?
Derek Smith:
Very cool. Well, we look forward to seeing more of the work you do with your students and the research that takes place in this role here at Baylor. And as we close you think about what's ahead in this role here at Baylor and that impact, what are you most excited about?
Hannah Stolze:
Yeah, I definitely coming to Baylor, I got to join and work with, I think leading researchers in organizational psychology and in supply chain ethics. And so on one side, I'm really excited about the colleagues that I get to work with on research and the work that we'll get to do that hopefully will impact industry in the future, but also the space of really encouraging and hopefully opening students' eyes to the potential witness that they can have and the potential impact that they can have if they pause and think about the choices and the opportunities that they have ahead of them in terms of global well-being and human flourishing globally.
Derek Smith:
Well, that's exciting. We look forward to that, and we're glad to have you here at Baylor. And appreciate you taking the time to share with us today on the program. Thanks so much for taking time to join us.
Hannah Stolze:
Thanks for having me.
Derek Smith:
Dr. Hannah Stolze, the William E. Crenshaw Endowed Chair in supply chain management. Our guest today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. Reminder, you can hear this in other programs online, baylor.edu/connections, and you can subscribe on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.