Overview

Table of Contents

About the Author

Preface

Foreward

In the last few years we have seen an explosion of publications on supply chain management; numerous books have been published and many articles have appeared in academic, trade, and popular magazines. These publications either are too technical— and therefore inaccessible to practitioners and students—or lack the breadth and depth that the topic deserves. Certainly, it is difficult to find a book appropriate for teaching supply chain management to business or engineering students. Designing and Managing the Supply Chain solves this problem!

The book is an important contribution and major milestone for the supply chain community. It is the first book that covers a comprehensive breadth of supply chain topics in depth, and addresses the major challenges in this area. It was written by experts from academia and industry who have been researching, consulting, and developing software for supply chain management for many years.

This book includes many classic and new case studies, numerous examples as well as in-depth analyses of some of the technical issues involved in inventory management, network design, and strategic partnering, to name a few. It is therefore an ideal textbook for classes on supply chain management at the undergraduate, Master’s, and M.B.A. levels. Since each chapter is self-contained, instructors can pick the chapters they want to use, depending on the length of the class and its requirements. The book comes with two computerized games. The Computerized Beer Game provides an excellent instructional tool that engages students in managing a supply chain and provides a starting point for discussing the value of information in the supply chain, strategic partnering, centralized decision making, and so forth. The Risk Pool Game allows students to gain insight on an important concept in supply chain management, called risk pooling. The authors have been most creative in using games to motivate and expose students to challenging subjects.

Finally, since many companies view supply chain management as the core of their business strategy, this book will also be of interest to managers involved in any of the processes that make up the supply chain. I want to compliment the authors for having written such an outstanding textbook for the supply chain community.

Hau L. Lee
Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital Professor
Director, Stanford Global Supply Chain Forum
Stanford University