Global Supply Chain Management

Prof. Michel Fender
Fall -- 1 credit
 
Global Supply Chain Management covers three major pillars: the customer service, the production operations and the logistics operations. The more advanced level of logistics maturity called Supply Chain Management has the purpose to trade-off the service delivered to the customers and the cost of the supply chain through an optimisation approach. At that level of maturity which considers the Supply Chain as a key business process, the challenges for the Boards is to apply this trade-off at three levels of integration: functional, geographical and sectorial in order to contribute to the competitive position of the company. The notion of "global" relates to these three integration levels which require the design and the implementation of collaborative solutions within the company itself and between the involved actors within the value chains.
 
This course addresses issues related to supply chain management at three levels:
 
  1. Strategy: How to get a competitive advantage by designing and implementing new Supply Chain business models? How to develop creative solutions within the value chains and what could be the role of new actors such as 4th Party Logistics? How to design in a concurrent way the new products, the production processes and the supply chain?
 
  2. Processes and related Information Technology: The drivers towards re-engineering supply chains are numerous but one of the most crucial ones is the innovation related to IT.  This is a very dynamic field at the decisional and transactional levels. The course focuses on those solutions and their providers -- such as APS, ERP, SCE, AOM,e-solutions,…

  3. Operational: strategic decisions and technological choices are rooted in a good understanding of the operational level of supply chain management. Some insights are given on these operational processes in the manufacturing, warehousing, cross-docking fields.