Design, Analysis and Optimization of Supply Chains

If you’re an executive dealing with extended supply chains, you live with stress and worry. Almost everything made today is manufactured by large networks of companies. Hundreds, if not thousands, of companies provide components, subassemblies, and major assemblies to a final manufacturer or integrator. These large distributed supply chains have created problems and headaches for many industries.

This book can help you prevent lost sales due to inventory shortages, high costs due to large inventories, work stoppage due to loss of a key supplier, and supply problems that may be causing a late introduction of a new product.

Today’s supply chains are not only highly complex in terms of the number of companies involved but also dynamically complex in that their behavior and performance variations over time range from “hard to comprehend” to baffling. It’s no wonder that management is so difficult and challenging. Developing an intuitive grasp of supply chain dynamic behavior is the first step in driving performance improvement.

In this book, a system dynamics framework for analyzing complex supply chain performance is presented. The feedback nature of supply chains is demonstrated and dynamic simulation models are used to examine the counterintuitive behavior that arises from time delays, lack of information, and incorrect planning assumptions. The benefits of establishing push–pull boundaries in supply chains are shown to provide increased customer service levels with reduced costs. Dynamic supply chain models are used to determine product lifecycle costs and the impacts of improved reliability on lifecycle costs. A basic system dynamics model is used to show that the goal of a “lean and mean” supply chain can be dangerous in periods of economic, political, and climatic volatility, and strategies are developed for improved supply chain management and performance.