Sustainable Operations and Supply Chain Management (O&SCM)

• Define core concepts of sustainable product design, operations, logistics, and supply chain management, and explain how they relate to broader societal dynamics.
• Demonstrate how insights from industry case studies connect to and illustrate key course concepts.
• Classify unintended consequences and identify sustainability dilemmas within operations, logistics, and supply chain management.
• Assess sustainability dilemmas in operations, logistics, and supply chain management by linking core concepts.
• Evaluate sustainability perspectives and arguments through structured dialogue with other student groups.
• Develop a system-level perspective on case studies by integrating insights from product design to societal dynamics over time.
• Identify, select, assess, apply, and criticise relevant literature and secondary data for a scientific issue and present a coherent argument.
• Organize sustainability dilemmas in causal loop diagrams, judge the unintended consequences, and develop solutions to them.

The course covers different aspects of operations and supply chain management (O&SCM) in light of sustainability goals. The course consists of the following five parts (not equal):

1. Product design for sustainability
2. Sustainable operations, including production, servitization, and the sharing economy
3. Sustainable logistics
4. Sustainable supply chains, including digital, multi-tier, and circular economy aspects
5. Supply networks and societal dynamics, including risk and resilience as well as a socio-political view

Moreover, the course will train and apply research methodology practices
and tools, in particular literature review, case study work, and causal loop
diagrams relevant to MSc engineering students.

Participation in the course requires competences corresponding to the admission requirements for the MSc programme in Industrial Engineering and Management.

Lectures, practice cases, exercises, project work and quizzes