Operations and Supply Chain Management

Beyond Lean: Simulation in Practice, 2nd Edition

Lean thinking, as well as associated processes and tools, have involved into a ubiquitous perspective for improving systems particularly in the manufacturing arena. With application experience has come an understanding of the boundaries of lean capabilities and the benefits of getting beyond these boundaries to further improve performance. Discrete event simulation is recognized as one beyond-the-boundaries of lean technique. Thus, the fundamental goal of this text is to show how discrete event simulation can be used in addition to lean thinking to achieve greater benefits in system improvement than with lean alone. Realizing this goal requires learning the problems that simulation solves as well as the methods required to solve them. The problems that simulation solves are captured in a collection of case studies. These studies serve as metaphors for industrial problems that are commonly addressed using lean and simulation.

Includes: Summary, problems, questions for discussion, active learning exercises, case studies

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library

The Cost of Being Landlocked: Logistics Costs and Supply Chain Reliability

This open access book proposes a revised approach to tackling the cost of being landlocked and a new analytical framework which uses a microeconomic approach to assess the trade and macroeconomic impacts of logistics. It argues that: (i) exporters and importers in landlocked developing countries face high logistics costs, which are highly detrimental to their competitiveness in world markets, (ii) high logistics costs depend on low logistics reliability and predictability, and (iii) low logistics reliability and predictability result mostly from rent-seeking and governance issues (prone to proliferate in low volume environments).

Licence: CC BY

Inventory Analytics

Inventory Analytics provides an introduction to the theory and practice of inventory control. The book outlines the foundations of inventory systems and surveys prescriptive analytics models for deterministic inventory control. It further discusses predictive analytics techniques for demand forecasting in inventory control and also examines prescriptive analytics models for stochastic inventory control.

Licence: CC BY

Next Generation Supply Chains: A Roadmap for Research and Innovation

Part One of this open access text focuses on the identification of the trends and related industrial scenarios for the next decade and the analysis of the implications for the Supply Chain (SC) processes and the consequent challenges. Part Two identifies the enabling technologies for SCs. Finally, Part Three presents the roadmap for future SCs proposing 10 SCs strategies and the related research and innovation priorities for the full integration of the production and distribution processes; moreover, in this part policy recommendations are provided to support companies facing cross-sectorial and horizontal issues through suitable policy actions.

Licence: CC BY

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