Matching supply with demand is a primary challenge for a firm: excess supply is too costly, inadequate supply irritates customers. Matching supply to demand is easiest when a firm has a flexible supply process, but flexibility is generally expensive. In the Supply Chain Management workshop, we will exchange ideas on:

How to assess the appropriate level of supply flexibility for your company
Explore strategies for economically increasing your supply flexibility

We will study coordination and incentives across multiple groups or players in a supply chain. While tactical models and decisions are part of this workshop, the emphasis is on the qualitative insights needed by general managers or management consultants. We will demonstrate that companies can use (and have used) the principles from this course to significantly enhance their competitiveness.

This workshop will examine how innovators are responding to dramatic market changes through smart supply chain design (or redesign), process changes and management. We begin with supply chain basics:/p>

1. What are the important supply chain components and metrics?
2. What are the primary cost tradeoffs?
3. What are the basic principles?

Several recent and influential innovations are then discussed, such as Advanced Available to Promise capabilities Accurate and Reliable Commitments, Production Cost reduction, new channel development, Risk Pooling, and Virtual Integration.

We focus on how information technologies have advanced supply chain integration and coordination, including supplier management, outsourcing decisions, and the impact of electronic commerce. We also consider supply chain incentive conflicts and possible solutions to those conflicts.

The use of Case Studies should be viewed as means to achieve an end of an aligned collaborative Supply Chain vision for your company. Cases do not provide solutions to problems; they provide the hooks to asking the right questions for approaching a solution. Therefore, while prior preparation on each case with thoughts and input on the case are expected, the cases must be constantly examined to leverage ideas that can be seen in the light of your company’s business processes and decision support.

Teams will be assigned certain papers to be presented during these sessions. At the beginning of the workshop, the facilitator will show how to glean through the most pertinent material from a paper, summarize learning, draw parallels to your company, and prepare a short deck (5-10 slides) to be presented to the other attendees. Over the ten weeks, each team will get at least one chance to present their thoughts on an article or paper that relates to the material.

Finally, central to this workshop is a multi-divisional team project that will be built through ongoing efforts throughout the 10 weeks and presented in the last session to a larger audience of senior management. We will assign projects to the multi-divisional teams around the key initiatives that senior management wishes to implement in 2006, and continually work with them to provide them best practices, tools, methodologies to come up with solution ideas, and an action plan.

The tentatively scheduled dates and time for the Workshop are as follows:

There will be a total of 10 sessions preceded by a logistics and kick-off session
The total time for the engagement will be 10 weeks (or as specified by your scheduling constraints)
The facilitator will encourage interactive discussion on each topic throughout the sessions
One case-study reading per week will be mandatory for all participants, additional readings are optional
One or two sessions of the workshop will involve senior management who will conduct a brainstorm session/forum to discuss issues
One session will be devoted to IT topics;
Importance of the team project will be emphasized to participants
A special certificate will be awarded to the best presentation by senior management (session 10)

A preliminary, non-mandatory session (Session 0, TBD) will be provided to all Workshop participants to review expectations, design, and syllabus of the Workshop.

When ideas arise for your initiatives throughout the course of the Workshop, they must be reviewed and brought to the attention of the Management team.

The team structure and breakdown of participants for the Workshop is tentatively set as follows:
20-25 people from each of the following divisions:

		Operations
		Sales
		Marketing
		Logistics
		Finance
		MIS/IT

Each team will be cross-functional, and “cross-level” (management paired with lower levels) across all teams
50% of the participants will be directors, or managers; 50% of the participants will be at lower-level
All participants for the Workshop will be assigned by Management
Everyone must attend all the sessions
The facilitator will encourage active team participation in all Workshops
Case-study write-ups will be a one-page summary, individually submitted

The tentative organizational structure of each session will be as follows:
45-60 minutes case study discussion
Guest Speakers (45 minutes, plus Q&A)
Team presentation (15-30 minutes)
Lecture on topic (0.5 hour)

An example workshop schedule is provided below. The Supply Chain Management Workshop is highly tailored to fit your specific business needs. While we provide the expertise in the areas described below in our proposed syllabus, we can expand and/or modify the sessions to fit your requirements.