Introduction to Operations and Supply Chain Management

• Explain and describe the concepts of value chains, supply chain management and operations management
• Explain and describe the concept of processes in the context of production planning and use methods for business process mapping to map the processes in a production in order to improve efficiency
• Explain the concept of quality and use quantitative methods of quality management
• Explain the concept of capacity and use decision trees for analysis
• Explain the concept of management of supplies and use basic methods for analyzing possible suppliers
• Explain the concept of logistics and the role of logistics in a supply chain and to be able to solve simple localization problems by mathematical optimization
• Describe the concept of forecasting and the most common qualitative forecasting methods and be able to use time series based as well as causal forecasting methods
• Explain the concept of “sales and operations planning” and be able to explain the three levels of planning (strategic, tactical and operational planning) and the difference between these
• Describe the concept of inventory management and use the most common quantitative methods for inventory management
• Explain and make use of the concepts “master schedule record”, “material requirement planning” (MRP), “production activity control” (PAC) and vendor order management within production planning
• Enter, edit and format data as well as construct and edit formulas and figures/charts in the spreadsheet software used, and solve simple optimization problems in this software
• Prepare a concise technical report that describes how qualitative as well as quantitative methods can be used for solving problems within operations and supply chain management

During the course, the planning problems and corresponding solution methods seen within the primary activities of a company will be discussed. These includes:
– Supply chain management (SCM) and operations management (OM) are exemplified through the learning game “The Beer Game”
– Production processes, the layout of production systems, and Business Process Management
– Quality and capacity management
– Management of supplies
– Logistics
– Forecasting
– Sales and Operations Planning
– Inventory management
– Production Planning

The weekly exercises and the mandatory group assignments will be carried out using the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software. These include basic data management and simple formula expressions, visualization (graphs and figures), and solving simple optimization problems using Microsoft Excel Solver.

Lectures and exercises

The course is designed as a first-semester course specially developed for the students enrolled in the BSc program “data science and management”. However, the course is also suitable as an introduction to the subject areas; “industrial engineering”, “operations management”, “production management” and “supply chain management” for students enrolled in DTU’s other BSc programs.