Supply Chain Planning and Analytics: The Right Product in the Right Place at the Right Time (Supply and Operations Management Collection)

Supply chain planning is concerned with making decisions about how many goods to procure, make, and deliver before knowing exactly what the demand for products is going to be. These planning decisions are difficult because they must be made with uncertain and dynamic information about future demand, available production capacity, and sources of supply. This book focuses on the three interlinked processes that compose effective supply chain planning: demand planning, sales and operations planning, and inventory and supply planning. If executed well, these planning processes will help a company to achieve its targeted balance between efficiency and responsiveness. If executed poorly, they can be the root cause of any number of supply chain problems. This book describes these processes, how they are interconnected, and the practical challenges of implementing them. It also explains the important ways in which analytical tools and methods can be utilized to make better supply chain planning decisions.

Gerald Feigin, PhD, has extensive experience in computer modeling, supply chain planning, inventory management, forecasting, and operations. He is a partner at Analytics Operations Engineering; a consulting company that applies advanced quantitative methods to solve challenging operations problems. Prior to joining Analytics, he was a research staff member in the manufacturing research department at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and was a solution architect at i2 Technologies. Dr. Feigin has served as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School in New York and at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, where he has taught classes in Supply Chain Management and Business Process Modeling. He is the author of the book Supply Chain Planning and Analytics.