Mary Ann Anderson is associate director for the Supply Chain Management Center at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business and a lecturer for the Department of Information, Risk and Operations Management. She teaches courses on operations management and supply chain management, with content on process analysis, inventory theory, Six Sigma process improvement, lean manufacturing, and system dynamics. As the center’s director, she is responsible for its internal operations and its growth through the recruiting of sponsor companies.

Anderson is also a principal consultant with Computer Aided Business Strategies Groups and an expert in building and optimizing business processes, measurement systems, and infrastructure to maximize results in such industries as electronics, automotive, energy, banking, and multimedia. She is also skilled in developing clients’ strategic plans through scenario planning, war gaming, and high-level computer simulations. Early in her career, Anderson was a manufacturing systems engineer with General Motors Co., where she helped the company reduce lead-time and resource costs while increasing flexibility in automotive product development.

She earned an M.S. in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the General Motors Institute of Technology (now Kettering University). Anderson is a co-author of “Operations Management for Dummies.”