Supply Chain Management eCourses
Since its inception in the early 1990's, the field of supply chain management has become tremendously important to companies in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. The term supply chain refers to the entire network of companies that work together to design, produce, deliver, and service products. In the past, companies focused primarily on manufacturing and quality improvements within their four walls; now their efforts extend beyond those walls to encompass the entire supply chain.
Why do this? Most of the gains achievable from an internal focus have been realized, while the opportunities that exist through cooperation and collaboration are the new frontier! This module will take you through key elements of supply chain management and provide a background for the concepts covered in our full-length modules.
Companies today are often presented with a myriad of supply chain strategies. How can you learn more about these strategies and decide which ones will help you the most? Are you operating the most appropriate type of supply chain? Are you spending time and money on strategies that aren't providing the maximum benefit? This is the first of two modules on Supply Chain Strategies designed to help you answer these questions.
You will begin by looking at product and supply chain characteristics and learning a framework for aligning the right strategies for your needs; you'll then learn strategies to improve efficiency and reduce costs. You will play a version of the classic "Beer Game" simulation used by business schools and executive training programs. Through the simulation you will see firsthand the causes of the Bullwhip Effect, which leads to major supply chain inefficiencies, including unpredictable lead times, stockouts, mistrust between supply chain partners, and higher manufacturing and transportation costs. Once you have covered the causes of these problems, you will learn the best strategies to mitigate or remove them.
This module will help you understand what type of supply chain you should be targeting, a critical first step in any supply chain initiative because putting teams to work on the wrong initiatives can cost you valuable time and money. Moreover, even within your company, several different types of supply chains may be called for; having a complete understanding of a wide range of strategies is just as important. Whether you run your supply chain initiatives in-house or hire outside professionals, you will find yourself better able to understand the appropriate steps to be taken.
The second of two modules on Supply Chain Strategies, this module will teach you a set of strategies designed for responsive supply chains. Building on the framework we presented in "SCM102: Supply Chain Strategies I: Aligning Strategies; Efficiency and Cost Savings), you will explore a set of concepts that will help improve customer response time and deal with highly uncertain demand. You will learn a powerful tool for hedging demand uncertainty, so that you can minimize your total cost by taking into account both the opportunity cost of stockouts and the costs of excess inventory.
You will learn several advanced, emerging strategies that apply to a wide range of supply chains. You'll see how to understand and cope with supply uncertainty to make your production process more reliable, use "active" demand management methods to minimize the impact of shortages, and discover new types of supplier arrangements that share risk among supply chain partners while providing benefits to all players. Finally, you'll see which of the strategies you've learned aren't software-intensive and understand how you should go about evaluating software for those cases where it is a critical part of the improvement strategy. This can prevent costly mistakes that don't move your company forward.
The Internet has already had a tremendous impact on the field of supply chain management, and there is more to come. Through this module you will see firsthand how a number of companies (Cisco, Dell, Adaptec, Zara, and Texas Instruments) have used the Internet successfully to lower costs and add value to their businesses. You will see a framework showing how the Internet impacts supply chains and you'll learn two major requirements for successful implementations. You will examine the variety of e-business relationships made possible through the Internet and learn important reasons why some approaches work better than others.
The Internet can create more sourcing opportunities for raw materials; we'll use a spot market simulation to show how combining long-term contracts with spot market purchases can reduce safety stocks and their associated holding costs. You'll also discover how emerging standards like Web Services (XML, SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL) can simplify information exchange and business processes within the enterprise and between supply chain partners; a closer look at RosettaNet will show how the development of standard business practices for Internet relationships can reduce costs and improve response times.
Finally, you can't just blindly accept everything you hear about the future of supply chain management; for each new innovation, the risks for each player must be weighed against the chain-wide benefits. You'll look to the future of Internet-enabled supply chains to gain an understanding of what challenges lie ahead for a number of new ideas.
Companies must always be concerned with their competition. Today's marketplace is shifting from individual company performance to supply chain performance: the entire chain's ability to meet end-customer needs through product availability and responsive, on-time delivery. Supply chain performance crosses both functional lines and company boundaries. Functional groups (engineering/R&D, manufacturing, and sales/marketing) are all instrumental in designing, building, and selling products most efficiently for the supply chain, and traditional company boundaries are changing as companies discover new ways of working together to achieve the ultimate supply chain goal: the ability to fill customer orders faster and more efficiently than the competition.
To achieve that goal, you need performance measures, or "metrics", for global supply chain performance improvements. Your performance measures must show not only how well you are providing for your customers (service metrics) but also how you are handling your business (speed, asset/inventory, and financial metrics). Given the cross-functional nature of many supply chain improvements, your metrics must prevent "organizational silo" behavior which can hinder supply chain performance.
This module will help you understand the importance of aligning metrics with your business strategy through insightful examples. You will explore service, asset, speed, and financial metrics, along with a special Bullwhip Metric to help you and your supply chain partners mitigate the Bullwhip Effect (covered in module SCM102). You will also discover "bad" metrics; metrics that are typically misunderstood or misused to the detriment of supply chain performance. Finally, you will see the challenges of attempting to measure the performance of the entire supply chain, along with some possible solutions to overcome those issues.