Supply Chain Engineering

Supply Chain Engineering, Models and Applications, by A. Ravi Ravindran and Donald P. Warsing, Jr., CRC Press 2013

If you were to name the best global supply chain models, who would they be?  Apple definitely, despite its labor issues, because it built a fast, transparent delivery system so powerful buyers can track their new devices from assembly to door.  And Wal-Mart, the biggest global employer in the world, early on realized the strategic pricing advantage leveraged by their all-encompassing supply network.

But what are the key components, the building blocks and decision points that make these supply networks so great,  and these very smart methods  be replicated? 

These are the kinds of questions you’ll consider in Supply Chain Engineering, a fresh and up-do-date primer on network design, theory and all the key apps, like optimization and MCDM (multi-criteria decision making), that you will want to understand.  This book even includes the algorithms that clatter away in the background of some complex networks.

This volume is included in curricula for industrial engineering and supply chain as well as MBA students, however it makes a good bridge for readers looking to move from simple lean or Japanese production methods based on kanban and cells, into deeper, more responsive globally integrated networks.  It is a challenge and will take some time, however, to read, understand and absorb the entire book, so let’s highlight the “don’t miss” chapters:

          1.6 Relationship between Supply Chain Metrics and Financial Metrics

          1.8.4  Chapter 5 (Location and Distribution Decisions in Supply Chains)

          3.5 Multi-Echelon Inventory Systems

          5.2 Supply Chain Network Optimization

          5.5  Real-world Applications, including a multi-national consumer product company, Procter and Gamble, Ford Motor, HP, BMW, AT & T and UPS. 

Exercises complete the book’s rigorous approach to proving the concepts.  Risk pooling, a key logistics method, is covered thoroughly with questions that plumb the reader’s general and detailed comprehension.

For readers wanting to progress through the entire spectrum of supply chain methods, this book is a failsafe approach because it covers the basics, and then takes us into more challenging and complex approaches. 

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