Operations & Supply Chain Management

Units: 1

Business cases and problems where data analysis is part of the decision-making process. Applications to finance, management, marketing, and operations. Proficiency in Excel methods commonly used in management. Completion of a project where students follow a business problem from formulation to solution using data analysis. Restricted to MBA students.

Offered in Fall Spring Summer

Units: 1

Continuation of a series of business cases and problems where data analysis is part of the decision making process. Estimation of linear relationships among variables, with applications to finance, management, marketing, and operations. Proficiency with Excel methods commonly used for estimation. Completion of a project where students follow a business problem from formulation to solution using the methods covered the course. Restricted to MBA students.

Offered in Fall and Spring

Units: 2

Design and management of operations and supply chains. Analysis of strategies, processes, planning and control, and advanced techniques using a variety of managerial frameworks and quantitative tools. Restricted to MBA students.

Offered in Fall and Spring

Units: 3

Major themes and strategies of supply management relationships. The focus is on establishing a basis for collaborative relationships with suppliers through focused market intelligence research, relationship assessment and management, negotiation, collaborative contracting, and on-going management of relationships in global supply chains. Emphasis on the importance of collaboration through the application of practical tools and approaches that drive mutually beneficial outcomes. Core processes around initial exploration and assessment of supply chain relationships, establishing metrics/expectations for the relationship, crafting and managing contracts, and sustaining continuous performance improvement in sourcing, logistics and operations. Every student will participate in a team-based supply chain project with an organization and will learn the team-based, deadline-driven nature of supply chain initiatives in a real-company setting.

Offered in Fall Only

Units: 3

Effective logistics decision-making using a variety of conceptual frameworks and quantitative tools. Relationship between logistics and broader issues of managing the entire supply chain and fulfilling the strategic objectives of a firm. Inventorymanagement. Transportation. Network design.

Offered in Fall and Spring

Units: 3

Design and management of planning and control systems within the organization and across the supply chain. Business planning, master production scheduling, material requirements planning, just-in-time and theory of constraints. Enterprise resourceplanning [ERP] and business-to-business [B2B] systems. Impact of information technologies on planning and control systems. Major project using state-of-the-art ERP system.

Offered in Spring Only

Units: 3

This course focuses on building a framework for understanding how operations decisions are made and how those decisions shape the firm's ability to effectively utilize its physical and human resources. It further explores how the physical and human resources help meet customer requirements through processes that convert diverse inputs into customer-valued outputs. Key topics include metrics for flow rate, flow time, and work in process, and the influence of resource decisions, uncertainty, buffering, batching, and control policies like "push" and "pull." Excel-based simulations and case studies are used to illustrate the principles and concepts listed above.

Offered in Fall and Spring

Units: 3

Structured framework for modeling and analyzing business decisions in the presence of uncertainty and complex interactions among decision parameters. Topics include decision models, value of information and control, risk attitude, spreadsheet applications, and decision analysis cycle. Interactive case study.

Offered in Fall Spring Summer

Units: 3

Strategic Operations Management, analyzes the various operations that are ongoing in a firm and how they relate to the organization's business strategy. This course teaches students how to evaluate and formulate an operations strategy and to analyze operational decisions which impact a firm's competitive position. The course builds upon the foundational concepts and models students have seen in previous operations courses to illustrate how operations fits within an organization and can be used as a competitive advantage.

Offered in Spring Only

Units: 3

The objective of the course is to build an understanding of how to manage and improve the performance [efficiency and responsiveness] of operations and supply chains through decision making that is based on analysis and facts, rather than intuition. The course introduces fundamental aspects of operations and supply chain management as well as analytical modeling tools and techniques that can be used to support decision making [e.g., optimization, regression analysis, simulation]. The approach taken in the course is entirely example-based and hands-on, since all these techniques will be implemented in Excel, either with Excel's built-in tools or with Excel add-ins.

Offered in Fall Only

Units: 3

Research project examining supply chain management issues at an organization, usually a member of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative. Projects will typically focus on procurement, logistics, materials management, operations, or integrated supply chain issues.

Offered in Fall and Spring

Units: 3

Identification, development, analysis, improvement and management of business processes. Strategic and executional issues critical to high-performance processes. Lean tools. Six sigma. Process redesign. Outsourcing. Service oriented architecture. Examples from different industries and functional areas within firms, to identify similarities and differences of well run processes.

Offered in Spring Only