MGT 610 – Operations Management – Week 1

Week 1 – Intro to Supply Chain and Clusters

The focus on this class will be in supply chains. The professor has extensive experience in supply chains so there will be real world examples in the lectures. The majority of the class looks to be case studies and papers, with exams, and discussion posts. There is a lot of reading to be done.

The first week we rode “Supply Chain Management” by Gaur. This delved deeply into supply chains and how to choose between the main forms depending on whether the product you sell is physically efficient or market responsive, with trade-offs between the two approaches. I found the discussion about bullwhip effects interesting, I am familiar with the term but not what it really meant within a supply chain. We went into other types of strategies for aligning supply chain partners through information sharing, and operational efficiency and how it can be accomplished. We also reviewed how risk can be shared along the supply chain by aligning incentives. Finally, the paper we wrote was based on the concept of clusters, which are geographically based concentrations in particular industries.