Karen M. Kneisel

Summary

When embarking on my college career at Dickinson I really did not know what I wanted to be when I “grew up.” I knew that I was comfortable with formulas and numbers, but how that translated into a job, I was not sure. When planning my course loads each semester, I simply enrolled in the courses that seemed most interesting to me. Those turned out to be mostly math and computer classes. Thus, I earned a mathematics degree.

After graduating, I wanted to expand my math skills in the business world. I attended graduate school to pursue a Master of Business Administration degree. Math problems had always boiled down to a right or wrong answer for me. However, at UCONN I learned that sometimes there is more than one answer to a problem, and this led me to believe that business and management decisions are very subjective. However, I still did take the classes that were most math-like such as finance, accounting, and statistics.

I went to work for Otis Elevator Company as a production planner after earning my MBA. I was concerned with having plenty of inventory to support the manufacturing operation, but not excess or waste. There is a delicate trade-off between having too much inventory (inventory carrying costs) and having too little (cost of halting the manufacturing operation due to not enough parts). I applied some Japanese manufacturing principles such as “Just-In-Time” inventory methods.