Sup­ply Chain Man­age­ment

Course content

Supply chain management is concerned with ‘the management of upstream and downstream relationships with suppliers and customers in order to create enhanced value in the final marketplace at less cost to the supply chain as a whole’ (Christopher). Consequently, a key objective of this module is to explore the concepts and principles that companies exploit to gain competitive advantage through their supply chain operations.

Often, supply chains are complex networks. To be effective, organizations need to take an integrated end to end (E2E) perspective to align the processes of Planning, Sourcing, Transformation, Fulfillment and Reverse logistics. Typically, this necessitates the orchestrations of significant assets (including inventory), technologies and systems capability. However, many of the barriers to supply chain management are not these technical aspects but organizational, for example, silo thinking, non-aligned KPI's, poor communication, etc. Therefore, this course will take a multidisciplinary approach to explore the subject.

Moreover, the way we have managed supply chains historically is being challenged in many ways. Increased turbulence in markets, disruptive technologies and unforeseen events mean that we need new thinking to ensure we effectively manage risk and build in resilience.

The course will also have resonance with those students from a service background, as many of the concepts discussed will be applicable in service contexts. More specifically, the course will provide tools and techniques for improving the performance of operations which can equally be applied to both physical and service operations. 

Finally, sustainability and corporate responsibility are emerging as important supply chain considerations.  This is especially the case when considering outsourcing and offshoring.  The module will consider a range of environmental and social/ethical issues relating to supply chain management.