Supply Chain Design

This Supply Chain Design course is part of the MITx MicroMasters Credential in Supply Chain Management, offered by #1 ranked SCM Master's program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CTL.SC2x Supply Chain Design covers all aspects involved in the design of supply chains for companies and organizations anywhere in the world. The course is divided into four main topic areas: Physical flow design, Supply chain finance, Information flow design, and Organization/Process design. In the design of physical flows, we show how to formulate and solve Transportation, Transshipment, Facility Location, and Network Design Problems. For financial flows we show how to translate supply chain concepts and actions into the language of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of a company. We cover Activity Based Costing, Working Capital, the Cash-to-Cash cycle and Discounted Cash Flow Analysis. The design of the information flow section describes how firms communicate with suppliers (procurement, risk contracts), internal resources (production planning, bills of materials, material requirements planning), and customers (Sales & Operations Planning and other collaboration based processes). In the last section, we introduce performance metric design and organizational design within the supply chain organization focusing mainly on the centralize/decentralize decision.

The main topic areas we will focus on in this course are:

• Supply Chain Network Design
• Supply Chain Finance
• Supplier Management
• Production and Demand Planning
• Process and Organizational Design

This course is indispensable if you’re considering a supply chain management career and, specifically, the positions of Supply Chain Analyst , Operations Manager , or Logistics Coordinator.

Week 1: Overview of Supply Chain Design: Introduction to Network Flow models.
Week 2: Basic Supply Chain Network Design: Facility Location and Network Design problems.
Week 3: Advanced Supply Chain Network Design: Modeling multiple products, multiple echelons, and multiple time periods.
Week 4: Supply Chain Finance I: Activity Based Costing, Working Capital, and Cash-to-Cash conversation cycle.
Week 5: Supply Chain Finance II: Discounted cash flow analysis and capital budgeting and investing.
Week 6: Supplier Management I: Auctions, sourcing, and procurement.
Week 7: Supplier Management II: Optimization based procurement, and risk sharing.
Week 8: Production Planning: Introduction to Bills of Material (BOM), Material Resource Planning (MRP) systems, and Distribution Resource Planning (DRP) systems.
Week 9: Demand Management: Challenges of collaboration with customers and management levers to improve coordination.
Week 10: Process & Organizational Design: The design of the supply chain organization itself.