Supply Chain: Complete Course from Basic to Advanced

Explore how supply chains touch everyday life, powering deliveries, warehousing, and logistics from farms to stores. See global sourcing, assembly, and distribution of cars, clothes, and electronics.

Explore the end-to-end supply chain from suppliers to factory to distribution networks and warehouses. Learn how material, cash, and information flow drive operations, plus reverse logistics handling returns.

Analyze how a smartphone supply chain moves electronic components, batteries, chargers, and plastics from producers to Indian assembly plants, with batteries mainly manufactured in China and final products shipped worldwide.

Explore the trade-off between cost and consumer requirements in supply chain design. Learn how inventory decisions, storage needs, and timely delivery impact costs across pharma, food, fmcg, and fashion.

Compute how supply chain surplus is the difference between the price customers pay and total costs to produce and distribute the product, and how higher surplus signals profitability and sustainability.

Explore manufacturing storage with drop shipment, where distribution partners collect orders and pass them to the factory, which ships to customers and lacks direct customer contact, avoiding retailer inventory.

Manufacturer to distribution center to retailer structures a supply chain where manufacturers partner with distributors who supply retail locations, handling local delivery with their own vehicles, ideal for FMCG goods.

Explore how independent distributors with an omni-channel network buy products from multiple factories, store inventory, and sell through direct sales, local retailers, and regional warehouses.

Explore decision making across supply chain design, planning, and execution. Learn how supplier and factory locations, outsourcing versus in-house production, and planning horizons drive demand fulfillment.

Explore planning in the supply chain as it coordinates money, machines, and people to meet business objectives and ensure product travels from suppliers to customers on time using forecasts.

Learn business planning, demand planning, sales and operations planning, production planning, supply planning, and logistics planning to align capacity, procurement, and delivery with forecasted demand.

Implement bottoms up demand planning by collecting district-level forecasts from sales representatives, aggregating to state and country levels, and reviewing each tier for a consolidated forecast.

Learn how over planning can cause excess and dead inventory, under planning can cut sales, and how lead times align the shortest planning horizon with the longest lead time.

Explore aggregate planning within the supply chain, balancing capacity, production, outsourcing, and inventory against demand while considering costs, lead times, and stockouts over a defined horizon.

Aggregate planning, or sales and operations planning, aligns cross-functional teams across material, money, and capacity. It uses planning horizon and demand forecasts to set production, inventory, backlog, and manpower needs.

Assess how workforce, outsourcing, supply plan of raw materials, overtime, constraints, and cost influence aggregate planning to meet peak demand and manage lean periods.

Explore aggregate planning strategies that balance cost and sales revenue by managing capacity and inventory, considering service level, back orders, and loss sales to optimize resource use.

Discover how materials requirement planning (mrp) uses bill of materials, production schedule, and inventory data to determine what is needed, how much, and when.

Understand how a bill of material, a list of items and quantities needed to make a product, guides assembly from a ball pen to an automobile.

Explore MRP flow by examining master schedule inputs—customer orders and forecast BOM—alongside on hand inventory, and study outputs like net requirements, work orders, plan order release, and exception reports.

Identify MRP inputs such as master schedule, on-hand inventory, planned receipts, and explain lead time components—procurement, sub-assemblies, assembly, testing, and final inspection—to plan production timing.

Explore MRP outputs, including planned order releases for supplier procurement, projected inventory, and production schedules, plus exception reports for capacity constraints to reschedule production.

Apply material requirements planning calculations using a ball pen bill of materials and master production schedule to determine gross and net requirements, on-hand stock, lead time, planned receipts, and planned orders.

Make to stock relies on forecasted demand and keeps stock in inventory before orders. This approach suits high-volume products with low obsolescence risk to push stock through distribution channels.

Assemble to order keeps inventories of components and assembles products only after customer orders, enabling customization for laptops or bicycles with minimal delay.

Configure to order standardizes the product, creates variation with minimal changes, and achieves quick lead times and low inventory, with beer alcohol content and pack sizes, paint shades on demand.

Engineer to order enables highly customized, complex, low-volume products with specifications that vary by customer. It requires close collaboration among engineering, procurement, and manufacturing to manage long lead times.

Explore the bullwhip effect as the amplification of demand signals across the supply chain, from consumer purchases to supplier orders, driven by lack of integrated demand visibility.

The bullwhip effect amplifies demand signals across the supply chain, increasing manufacturing and inventory costs, replenishment lead times, transportation and labor costs, reducing product availability and profitability, and eroding trust.

Identify causes of the bullwhip effect, including price discount, order batching, shortage gaming, and forecast inaccuracy, and counter with stable pricing, timely communication, frequent small orders, and strong information sharing.

Explore logistics by examining warehousing, transportation, and the import and export of products, focusing on storage and delivering the right item at the right time.

Explore warehousing objectives, including storage, shipment consolidation via transit warehouses, and value-added services like kitting. Examine the warehouse process flow from receiving to dispatch and transportation modes and costs.