Supply Chain Management

Welcome to Supply Chain Management! In this course, you’ll build a foundation in terms, concepts and phenomena in supply chain systems and processes. You will understand the scale, size, and complexity as well as the decision-making levels in the modern supply chain, and learn to assess the dynamics and impact of constituent processes and functions. You will learn quantitative tools and techniques for managing processes including statistical process control, queuing etc.

This course will begin by covering the concepts, methods and practices in the prevalent pedagogical content in this domain, and identify the settings amenable for improvement by recent advances in data availability and other domains like AI/ML, and optimisation amongst others. The course is divided across 5 weeks. You will learn that effective supply chain management involves coordinating activities across the entire supply chain, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished goods to customers. We will discuss key concepts such as production function, make vs buy decision, quality management, product and service designs, facility location selection, capacity planning, layout design, and last but not least bullwhip and learning effects.

• Sourcing Continuum: Make or Buy
• In this module, you will learn the production functions, decision points arising in organizing, and managing production and supply chains. This module will let you survey the popular media to sample supply chain-related narratives. It will reflect upon the stories to discuss how the supply chain dynamics impact stakeholders and societies. This module will elaborate on the key decisions of making or buying. Furthermore, you will be able to define and distinguish the paradigms in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). In this module, you will also explore the examples of each paradigm and it will converge towards the discipline of operations and supply chain management.
• Evolution of Operations and Supply Chain Management
• This module will enable you to learn deep-dive into the background of operations and supply chain management along with the current trends. Furthermore, you will be able to analyze the various taxonomies relevant to operations and supply chain management. The module will enable you to learn about quality management, where you will further delve into various definitions and value proportions related to quality. This will help you to define and distinguish the determinants of quality. In addition to these, you will learn more about the analytical methods of quality. Also, this module will provide you insights on about six sigma, statistical process control, and process capability analysis, which have broad applications in operations and supply chain management.
• Design of Products and Services
• In this module, you will learn about quality function deployment. This module will provide you with the necessary information on the various considerations in product design. You will learn how to analyze the design process. This module will enable you to learn more about service design. In service design, you will learn about the fundamentals of the queueing system. You will learn more about the various queueing systems like M/M/1, M/M/S, and M/M/Infinite. Furthermore, you will be able to define and distinguish the various queueing systems. Apart from these, you will learn how to perform the analysis of any queueing system.
• Process Strategy
• The prime focus of this module is to enable you to learn the break-even analysis. Then, you will learn how to use the costs in the break-even analysis. Through this module, you will be able to identify the break-even point by seeing the break-even diagram. Furthermore, you will be able to solve any numerical problem related to break-even analysis. Apart from these, for your better understanding, you will be provided with examples related to break-even analysis.
• Facility Location Selection and Facility Design
• In this module, you will learn about the considerations in location selection. You will be introduced to the various techniques used for location selection, such as location actor setting, the center of gravity, load distance, and geo-information systems. Furthermore, you will be able to define capacity expansion and the best operating level. In addition to these, you will learn what is a layout design. You will also learn how to use the typology of layouts like process layouts, product layouts, and hybrid layouts.
• Phenomenon in Supply Chains
• In this module, you will learn about the learning effects and learning curves. You will also learn about the different constituents of a learning effect. This module will enable you to explore the various implications due to the learning effect. Furthermore, you will learn about the bullwhip effect within a supply chain. This module will let you survey the causes of the bullwhip effect.
• Course Recap and Next Steps