Every company must continually wrestle with the problem of deciding the right quantity and mix of products or services that it should produce as well as when and where to produce them. The problem is challenging because the decision must be made with uncertain and conflicting information about future demand, available production capacity, and sources of supply. The decision is in fact a highly complex balancing act, involving tradeoffs along many dimensions - for example, inventory targets vs. customer service levels, older products vs. newer ones, direct customers vs. channel partners - and requiring the compromise of constituents - sales, marketing, operations, procurement, product development, finance, as well as suppliers and customers - with varied objectives. The ability of a company to nimbly navigate this decision process without giving too much influence to any of the parties involved largely determines how well the company can respond to changing market conditions and ultimately whether the company will continue to thrive. This book focuses on the complex challenges of supply chain planning - the set of business processes that companies use for planning to meet future demand. Supply chain planning comprises a variety of planning processes within an organization: demand planning, sales & operations planning, inventory planning, promotion planning, supply planning, production planning, distribution planning, and capacity planning. Of course, not all companies engage in all of these planning activities and they may refer to these activities by other names but they all struggle with the on-going effort of matching demand with supply. Many textbooks address supply chain planning problems and present mathematical tools and methods for solving certain classes of problems. This book is intended to complement these texts by focusing not on the mathematical models but on the problems that arise in practice that either these models do not adequately address or that make applying the models difficult or impossible. The book is not intended to provide pat solutions to these problems, but more to highlight the complexities and subtleties involved and describe ways to overcome practical issues that have worked for some companies.

Supply chain planning can feel daunting and confusing and so much more. How can you make decisions about how many goods to procure, make, and deliver before knowing exactly what the demand for products is going to be? Gerald Feigin, a partner at Analytics Operations Engineering, has answers. Feigin helps you and other decision makers understand the dynamic information about future demand, available production capacity, and sources of supply. This book smartly focuses on the three interlinked processes that compose effective supply chain planning: demand planning, sales and operations planning, and inventory and supply planning. When executed well, these planning processes will help a company to achieve its targeted balance between efficiency and responsiveness. Read more and learn specifics about these processes, and how they are interconnected and the practical challenges of implementing them. Feigin also explains the important ways in which analytical tools and methods can be utilized to make better supply chain planning decisions.

An incredible volume of data is generated at a very high speed within the supply chain and it is necessary to understand, use and effectively apply the knowledge learned from analyzing data using intelligent business models. However, practitioners and students in the field of supply chain management face a number of challenges when dealing with business models and mathematical modelling. Supply Chain Analytics and Modelling presents a range of business analytics models used within the supply chain to help readers develop knowledge on a variety of topics to overcome common issues. Supply Chain Analytics and Modelling covers areas including supply chain planning, single and multi-objective optimization, demand forecasting, product allocations, end-to-end supply chain simulation, vehicle routing and scheduling models. Learning is supported by case studies of specialist software packages for each example. Readers will also be provided with a critical view on how supply chain management performance measurement systems have been developed and supported by reliable and accurate data available in the supply chain. Online resources including lecturer slides are available.

This innovative new core textbook, written by an experienced professor and practitioner in supply chain management, offers a business-focused overview of the applications of data analytics and machine learning to supply chain management. Accessible yet rigorous, this text introduces students to the relevant concepts and techniques needed for data analysis and decision making in modern supply chains and enables them to develop proficiency in a popular and powerful programming software. Suitable for use on upper-level undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA courses in supply chain management, it covers all of the major supply chain processes, including managing supply and demand, warehousing and inventory control, transportation and route optimization. Each chapter comes with practical real-world examples drawn from a range of business contexts, including Amazon and Starbucks, case study discussion questions, computer-assisted exercises and programming projects.

Master a complete, five-step roadmap for leveraging Big Data and analytics to gain unprecedented competitive advantage from your supply chain. Using Big Data, pioneers such as Amazon, UPS, and Wal-Mart are gaining unprecedented mastery over their supply chains. They are achieving greater visibility into inventory levels, order fulfillment rates, material and product delivery… using predictive data analytics to match supply with demand; leveraging new planning strengths to optimize their sales channel strategies; optimizing supply chain strategy and competitive priorities; even launching powerful new ventures. Despite these opportunities, many supply chain operations are gaining limited or no value from Big Data. In Big Data Driven Supply Chain Management, Nada Sanders presents a systematic five-step framework for using Big Data in supply chains. You'll learn best practices for segmenting and analyzing customers, defining competitive priorities for each segment, aligning functions behind strategy, dissolving organizational boundaries to sense demand and make better decisions, and choose the right metrics to support all of this. Using these techniques, you can overcome the widespread obstacles to making the most of Big Data in your supply chain — and earn big profits from the data you're already generating. For all executives, managers, and analysts interested in using Big Data technologies to improve supply chain performance.

Customer satisfaction is a pivotal component to any business that provides goods or services to the public. By effectively managing the flow of products, business can adapt to the growing demands of consumers and deliver successful customer service. The Handbook of Research on Strategic Supply Chain Management in the Retail Industry is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on properly managing business processes in order to satisfy end-user requirements and increase competitive advantage in the retail marketplace. Highlighting concepts relating to field applications, customer relationships, and current trends in logistics management, this book is ideally designed for business professionals, managers, upper-level students, and researchers interested in innovative strategies and best practices in modern supply chains.

Despite significant achievements, the discipline of supply chain management is still unable to satisfactorily handle many practical real-world challenges. The authors of Networks Against Time claim that a unified supply chain network analytics framework is needed which should be able to handle optimization and competitive behavior while also maintain relevance to many industrial sectors in which perishable products are prominent, from healthcare to food and from fashion apparel to technology. This Brief provides a wide range of critical supply chain problems which are modeled as generalized networks. Guidelines are provided to determine the arc multipliers that capture perish ability of the product whether food, radioisotopes, or even highly perishable blood in healthcare over space and time. Through case studies the authors portray the application of the models and algorithms to real-world sectors which illustrate the power of the framework in practice. The models and algorithms are fully described along with the input and output data in the case studies. This level of transparency is useful pedagogically as well as for future research and for applications in practice. Researchers and practitioners in mathematics, in operations research and management science, operations management, as well as in economics and computer science will find this book useful to gain a broader appreciation of the richness of network supply chain structures, processes, and applications. This book can also be used by advanced undergraduate students and graduate students in the disciplines noted above to familiarize themselves with methodologies and supply chain network models and applications.​​