Faculty Publications

Supply Chain Management:
Strategy, Planning, and Operation
by Sunil Chopra and Peter Meindl

This book has grown from a course on supply chain management taught to second-year MBA students at the Kellogg School of Management. The goal of this class is to cover not only high-level supply chain strategy and concepts, but also to give students a solid understanding of the analytical tools necessary to solve supply chain problems. With this class goal in mind, our objective was to create a book that would develop an understanding of the following three key areas and their interrelationships:

The strategic role of the supply chain Key drivers of supply chain performance Analytical tools and techniques for supply chain analysis

Our first objective in this book is for the reader to learn the strategic importance of good supply chain design, planning, and operation for every firm. The reader will be able to understand and visualize how good supply chain management can be a competitive advantage for a firm. Similarly, a reader should understand how weaknesses in supply chain design, planning, and operation can hurt the performance of a firm. We use several examples to illustrate this idea and develop a strategic framework for supply chain management.

Within the strategic framework we identify inventory, transportation, information, and facilities as the key drivers of supply chain performance. Our second goal in the book is to convey how these drivers may be used on a conceptual level during supply chain design, planning, and operation to improve performance. For each driver of supply chain performance, our goal is to provide readers with practical managerial levers and concepts that may be used to improve supply chain performance.

Utilizing these managerial levers optimally during the design, planning, and operational phases requires knowledge of logistics and supply chain methodologies. Our third goal is to give the reader knowledge of these methodologies. Every methodological discussion is illustrated with its application in Excel. When discussing methodologies and techniques, we stress the managerial context in which they are used and the managerial levers for improvement that they support.

The strategic framework and concepts discussed in the book are tied together through a variety of examples that show how a combination of concepts is needed to achieve significant increases in performance. There is a particular focus on the analysis of e-business and how it can help firms in different industries improve their supply chain performance.

The book is targeted toward an academic as well as a practitioner audience. On the academic side, it should be appropriate for MBA, engineering management, or senior undergraduate courses in logistics and supply chain management. It should also serve as a suitable reference for both concepts as well as methodology for practitioners in consulting as well as industry.

There are many people we would like to thank who helped us throughout this process. We thank the reviewers whose suggestions significantly improved the book: James Noble, University of Missouri-Columbia; Sime Curkovic, Western Michigan University; Effie Stavrulaki, Penn State University; and James K. Higginson, University of Waterloo (Ontario). We are grateful to the students at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management who suffered through typo-ridden drafts of earlier versions of the book. Specially, we thank Christoph Roettelle and Vikas Vats for carefully reviewing several chapters and solving problems at the end of chapters. Our developmental editor, Libby Rubenstein, who read all our writing with a critical eye and raised all the right issues, was instrumental in improving the book. The book is much better because of her involvement. We would also like to thank our editor Tom Tucker and the staff at Prentice-Hall for their effort with the book. Finally, we'd like to thank you, our readers, for reading and using this book. We hope it contributes to all your efforts to improve the performance of companies and supply chains throughout the world.