Supply Chain Management

Content

Buying products and using services is part of our daily life. We buy books, groceries, and computers and we use telephones, watch movies, and fly on planes. When doing so, we demand high quality and good service at a low price. How these demands can be fulfilled covered by supply chain management. Supply chain management is about designing, producing, delivering and selling products and services – and about doing so profitably. It has emerged as one of the most powerful business subjects and successful companies all over the world are using supply chain management to improve quality, increase customer service, reduce costs and build new revenues.

In the course Supply Chain Strategy we analyze the strategic decisions and the design aspects of supply chain management and cover corporate strategy, product design, process design and simulation. The corporate strategy defines the framework and the direction of all business activities of a company. We analyze how a corporate strategy is implemented and also reinforced and refined by supply chain operations. Once the corporate strategy is defined, products and services are developed that support the strategy. We discuss how a good product design process is structured, controlled and managed and apply product design tools to the optimization of selected products and services. For the efficient creation of products and delivery of services, appropriate process designs must be created and implemented. We discuss how good process structures can be constructed and how the details of the process design can be optimized with computer simulation. Finally, we discuss how Supply Chain Management approaches have been applied in various industries.

The course consists of lectures, case study discussions, and simulations.