Global Supply Chain Management

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

"In his book, Edward Humes estimates that coffee beans can travel a distance greater than the Earth’s circumference before they are used to make a cup of coffee. If even simple products have such long and complex supply chains, what about complex products, like phones and airplanes? Should supply chains for iPhones or Boeing 787 airplanes be structured, managed, and evaluated differently than supply chains for coffee or T-shirts? How? How do the supply chains of Google and Facebook look like? What about supply chains for vaccines? You should take this course to find out. By the end of the course, you will have learned through hands-on, practical examples, case discussions, simulations, and games about: 1) Supply chains taxonomies by demand and supply characteristics, and the importance of matching supply chains with the strategic objectives and business models, 2) Strategic, operational, and tactical activities in supply chains, 3) Metrics for evaluating supply chain operational and financial performance, 4) Key factors for network design, strengths and weaknesses of various distribution metrics, optimization framework for network design, 5) Inventory and capacity management analytic tools, key factors for making decisions, and key drivers of business value, 6) Types of forecasts, basic approaches to forecasting, analytics of forecasting, 7) Costs and benefits of global sourcing, the value of flexibility, postponement, risk diversification, 8) Effects of asymmetric information in supply chains, the role of misalignment of incentives, competition for limited resources, and how to align incentives using contracts and other methods 9) The best practices in Supply Chain Risk Management and Business Continuity Management frameworks, tools, and metrics, 10) The process for risk identification, analysis, and mitigation, qualitative and quantitative metrics of risk, the importance of information and transparency, novel technologies to create supply chain transparency, 11)The role of financial information in assessing supply risk, and 12) Best practices in crisis management, processes, and tools."