Business Administration: Supply Chain Management

Explores how firms can organize supply chains to more effectively align supply with the demand for products. Prerequisites: BUS 2700; Business Administration major or minor; Engineering Management major, or Graduate Master of Accountancy student; minimum Junior standing or graduate standing; other majors or minors by Instructor permission.

Prerequisites: BUS 2700; Business Admin. major or minor; Engineering Management major, or Graduate Master of Accountancy student; minimum Junior standing or graduate standing; Grad students must receive permission of Graduate College; other majors or minors by Instructor permission.

Modality: In-Person Pre-requisites BUS 3730A – Supply Chain Management is designed for both seniors and graduate level students. Minimum Prerequisites: Junior standing; BUS 2700; Required course specific fee of $20; Degree students only even after level restrictions removed; CE students register for BUS 3730 ZRB. Course objectives Matching supply with demand is an enormous challenge for companies in many industries: excess supply can lead to costly inventory write offs, while inadequate supply irritates customers and results in lost revenue. In this course, we will explore how firms can organize their supply chains so that they more effectively align supply with the demand for their products. Our aim is to focus on high-level insights needed by general managers and management consultants. Our emphasis is on managing uncertainty and risk, both within the firm (building on the principles learned in basic courses on Operations Management such as BUS 2700) and across the supply chain. We will study how companies have used the principles from this course to significantly enhance their competitiveness and, most importantly, to innovate business models. In the age of globalization and outsourcing, growing product variety and shrinking product life cycles, the issues of supply chain management continue to capture a lot of attention of companies' executives. At the same time, examples of companies such as Toyota, Zappos, Zara, Netflix, Amazon, Ikea, Wal-Mart and others demonstrate how, by excelling in supply chain management, a company can revolutionize the industry by advancing new business models and thus create enormous wealth for the shareholders. The course is designed as a combination of lecturers, case discussions and games with the goal of defining key trade-offs that general managers need to understand and evaluate to successfully manage complex supply chains. Quantitative tools designed to evaluate these tradeoffs will be studied and used extensively throughout the course. The course will be presented in 27 sessions with the focus on applying concepts in actual management situations. More specifically, this course focuses on the development and application of decision models in supply chains with emphasis on demand forecasting, aggregate planning, inventory management (cycle and safety), supply network design, transportation, coordination and sourcing. Office hours TBA Location: 207 Kalkin Hall Email: hdo@uvm.edu Detailed and Latest course information Announcements, Detailed Lecture Plan, Lecture Slides/Notes, HW assignments, additional notes, etc. will be posted on the course site of the Black Board. Students are responsible to get information from the course site in a timely manner. Textbooks Required textbook Chopra, S., and Meindl, P. Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation, 5th Edition, Prentice Hall. Reference books Gerard Cachon and Christian Terwiesch (2012), Matching Supply with Demand: An Introduction to Operations Management, 3rd Edition, McGraw-Hill/Irwin. Other material Assigned cases from Chopra's book, HBS, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and readings (readings will be provided during the course of the semester).

Grading Class Attendance and Participation: 10% Case Assignments: 30% Test 1 (Mid-term): 25% Test 2 (Final): 35% Exam Comments 1. All exams are open-book, open notes. 2. The final exam (Test 2) will be comprehensive. 3. There will be NO MAKE-UP TESTS for Test 1. If you have to miss Test 1 for compelling reasons, the percentage of the missing test will be included in your Test 2 (Final). A make-up test for the final can be offered only for compelling circumstances, such as medical emergency. Additional requirement for graduate students There are 4 case analysis assignments for undergraduate students in teams of 4-5 students (please refer to the detailed lecture plan for more information). For graduate students, there are two more cases (out of the following three) to analyze: 1. Leadership Online (A): Barnes & Noble vs. Amazon.com. By Pankaj Ghemawat and Bret Baird. Harvard Business Review. 2. Hewlett-Packard DeskJet Printer Supply Chain (A). By Laura Kopczak, Hau Lee. Stanford Graduate School of Business 3. Li & Fung: Growth for a Supply-Chain Specialist. By Stephen Ko and Grace Loo. Harvard Business Review. Group size of graduate students is typically from 2 to 3, demanding more effort for each student. More exercises and projects will be assigned to individual graduate students throughout the semester.