Logistics and Supply Chains - Fundamentals,Design,Operations

Managers design focused logistics strategies by balancing costs, service levels, and delivery speed, choosing among cost leadership, product differentiation, or market niche to meet pressing needs.

Define the logistics infrastructure by selecting a structure—functional, product, hybrid, matrix, or self-managed—that aligns with strategy and is supported by systems, human resources, and culture.

Integrates supply chain partners across internal and external levels to satisfy final customers, delivering shared information, improved material flow, lower costs, and faster deliveries.

Recognize a shared aim of satisfying the final customer and replace conflict with agreement to enable external integration across the supply chain through customer relationship management.

Explore demand management across make-to-stock, assemble-to-order, make-to-order, and engineer-to-order environments around the customer order decoupling point. Balance inventory with service and apply collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment.

Learn time series methods for forecasting in logistics, including trend, seasonal, cyclical, and random components, with moving averages, weighted averages, hand fitting, least squares, and seasonal indexes.

Assess forecast accuracy by comparing actual demand to forecast, using mean absolute deviation and tracking signals, with exponential smoothing and control charts with action limits based on standard deviation.

Explore practical demand forecasting techniques, including simple and weighted moving averages, seasonalized forecasts using trend and seasonal indexes, and exponential smoothing for inventory and production planning, with ready-to-use formulas.

Aligns demand and supply for each product family through a formal S&OP process, using monthly forecasts, demand planning, and management reviews to update the operations plan, inventory, and backlog.

Demonstrate how a chase demand operating plan guides monthly updates to production and staffing in S&OP, using the forecast, plan, and actual results.

Explore the level operating plan with a constant workforce to meet forecasted demand. Calculate required production, end-of-horizon inventory, and staffing using the given data.

Use a solver-driven sales and operations planning model to optimize regular and overtime production, hiring, firing, and inventory under balance equations and constraints, then compare costs to actual results.

Learn how a two-level master production schedule coordinates final assembly and component production using discrete available-to-promise logic for assemble-to-order products, illustrated with 3hp tillers Max and Original.

Examine the basic material requirements planning record, including gross requirements, scheduled receipts, and projected available balance. Understand time buckets, planning horizon, lead time, and how planned order releases prevent shortages.

Explain gross to net explosion in records processing, translating product requirements into component part requirements while accounting for inventory, scheduled receipts, and snow shovel dependent demands in material requirements planning.

Examine lot sizing within MRP, using time-phased records to create discrete lot sizes, compare lot-for-lot and fixed lots, and apply safety stock and safety lead time, low-level coding, and pegging.

Explore how MRP transaction processing replans activities when changes occur, including launching planned orders, allocating raw materials, and rescheduling due dates across multi-level bill of materials.

Learn how small changes in the master production schedule amplify through MRP, causing nervousness in multi-level structures, and apply stability, selective lot sizing, and firm planned orders to dampen it.

Manage day-to-day operations by updating DRP records with actual demand and receipts, and stabilize planning by using firm planned orders or error addback to reflect current demand.

Match capacity to forecasted demand with a six-step process: forecast demand, assess capacity, identify mismatches, propose alternative plans, choose the best, and implement and monitor.

Plan capacity using multiple methods—forecast demand, identify bottlenecks, and generate alternative plans through negotiation, heuristics, adjustments, spreadsheets, graphical analysis, simulation, expert systems, and mathematical models, guided by cost-benefit trade-offs.

Explore cross-selling and up-selling strategies to boost customer value and retention through data-driven marketing automation. Understand churn risk, customer profitability, and channel management for targeted campaigns.

Explore how sales force automation transforms customer relationship management across marketing, sales, and support, automating lead, contact, and activity management to boost productivity and close rates.

Supply management significantly affects a firm's bottom line by influencing sales and costs through procurement. Strategic supply chain practices and total cost of ownership improvements enhance profitability and competitiveness.

Identify user material needs, examine purchase requests, and decide make-or-buy options; describe materials and evaluate suppliers through bids to select the best, ensuring timely, high-quality deliveries.

Explore total cost components: acquisition costs, ownership costs, and post-ownership costs. Learn how purchase price, planning, quality, taxes, and cycle times influence total cost of ownership.

Compare total cost of ownership and net present value analyses to estimate acquisition, operating, and post-ownership costs, using present value and discount rate to guide investment choices.

Identify and select a well-qualified supplier who can guarantee quality, on-time delivery, and favorable terms, then monitor performance and decide between single or multi-sourcing strategies.

Explore the 3 m model - non-critical, bottleneck, strategic materials - showing how procurement effort matches value, with supplier ratings, repeat/blanket orders, and price lists, special quotations, negotiation, and commodity pricing.

Explore the economic order quantity and its sensitivity, showing variable costs stay near the minimum within 64%–156% of EOQ, and how combining orders reduces reorder costs.

Compare infinite set and feasible set location approaches, using the center of gravity of demand to balance costs to customers and suppliers, with real-world Alberta examples.

Explore scoring models for location decisions, weighing infrastructure, proximity to customers, suppliers, climate, and accessibility using a five-step method to compare sites.