"Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation" by Sunil Chopra and Peter Meindl provides comprehensive insights into the strategic aspects, planning techniques, and operational considerations essential for managing supply chains effectively.
The authors emphasize the strategic significance of supply chains, elucidating key drivers of supply chain performance and offering analytical tools for supply chain analysis. This book is tailored for advanced undergraduate and MBA courses in Supply Chain Management, providing a blend of theoretical frameworks and practical applications.
The text delves into various critical aspects of supply chain management, ranging from inventory management to distribution network design, and from demand forecasting to managing economies of scale. Here's a breakdown of the key chapters and concepts covered:
Inventory Management: Explains the reasons for inventory existence, types of inventory such as cycle and seasonal inventory, and factors influencing inventory decisions.
Designing Distribution Networks: Discusses factors influencing distribution network design, supply chain costs affected by network changes, and options for distribution network design.
Network Design in the Supply Chain: Explores the macroeconomic factors influencing network design decisions, phases of network design decisions, and models for facility location and capacity allocation.
Making Network Design Decisions in Practice: Highlights considerations such as facility lifespan, cultural implications, quality-of-life issues, and the importance of tariffs and tax incentives in network design decisions.
Demand Forecasting in a Supply Chain: Covers characteristics of forecasts, components of demand forecasting, forecasting methods, systematic and random components of demand, and the basic approach to demand forecasting.
Managing Economies of Scale in a Supply Chain: Discusses cycle inventory in a supply chain, estimating cycle inventory-related costs, exploiting fixed costs, aggregating multiple products in orders, and short-term discounting through trade promotions.
The book emphasizes the integration of demand planning and forecasting throughout the supply chain, the significance of understanding factors influencing demand forecasts, and the importance of effective forecasting methods. It also addresses practical strategies for managing economies of scale, optimizing inventory levels, and designing efficient distribution networks.