Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation

As supply chain management has been gaining recognition as an important area of competitive strategy, the last few years saw a flurry of new textbooks on the subject. Most of those books focus on managerial strategies. Chopra and Meindl's book, Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation, is a comprehensive introduction on supply chain management with a unique analytical focus. This book is ideal for a higher‐level course with an emphasis on quantitative analysis and practical applications of concepts.

The contents of the book are as follows. The book is organized into six parts and further divided into fifteen chapters. In part one, consisting of three chapters, Chopra and Meindl establish a strategic framework for analyzing supply chains. This includes definitions and examples of supply chains, relationships between supply chain strategy and a firm's competitive strategy, and drivers and obstacles of supply chain performance. The key drivers are described as inventory, transportation, facilities, and information. Part two discusses how to plan supply and demand. The three chapters in this part cover forecasting, aggregate planning, and managing variability in supply and demand. Part three is on inventory management. The three chapters in part three discuss cycle inventory, safety inventory, and determining the level of product availability. Part four, in three chapters, covers transportation, network design, and information technology. Discussion of information technology naturally leads to part five, which covers coordination and e‐business in the supply chain. Part six, consisting of a single chapter, covers the financial evaluation of supply chain decisions. All of the chapters have discussion questions at the end and most of the chapters have exercises. The six cases included in the book are quantitative. The exercises and the cases require the use of Microsoft Excel.

The textbook comes with two supplements: an instructor's manual and a companion Web site. The instructor's manual includes a sample syllabus, lists of additional readings and cases, and teaching suggestions. The companion Web site contains Excel files for textbook examples and some additional notes (third party logistics, postponement, vendor managed inventories, and a descriptive case of 7‐Eleven Japan). Instructors can download PowerPoint files and Excel solutions to homework problems.

Evolved from a course taught to second‐year MBA students at Northwestern University, Chopra and Meindl's book is appropriate for an MBA or senior undergraduate course. The authors state that it can also serve as a reference for a practitioner in consulting or in industry. The book does assume some familiarity with quantitative topics such as mathematical programming and statistics in addition to facility with Excel.

This book has strengths as a textbook that differentiates it from other textbooks on supply chain management. It contains numerical examples, using Excel, that illustrate concretely the concepts discussed in the book. While the book has a heavy analytical focus, the analytical models are discussed in managerial context. In addition, it provides many managerial insights and tips (called “managerial levers” by the authors) to use in improving supply chain performance. Toward the end of each chapter, there is a section addressing decision making in practice. This ties together the quantitative and qualitative concepts learned in each chapter and transforms them into applications which readers can use. The book contains many examples of well‐known companies such as Dell, 7‐Eleven, Wal‐Mart, The Gap, Amazon.com, L.L. Bean. Descriptions of real companies’ supply management practices are used to illustrate the concepts throughout the book.

However, the book has several weaknesses that I hope will be addressed in the next edition. As a textbook, it can benefit from a more substantive instructor supplement that includes a test bank and answers to discussion questions. Also, the book generally has only one exercise pertaining to each quantitative topic. There should be more exercises to provide sufficient practice with the quantitative concepts. Some of the mathematical topics are not explained in sufficient detail. Such examples include vehicle routing, gravity location models, network optimization models, and use of Excel Solver to solve optimization problems. Students will need instructor's extensive guidance to understand such topics. As such, it is not be suitable as a reference book for a manager who does not have a strong quantitative background. In addition, the book suffers from numerous typographical errors that are not mentioned in the errata included in the companion Web site.

Finally, the beer game is only briefly described in one of the chapter appendices. The beer game is valuable in a discussion of supply chain coordination. It would be desirable to include more details regarding the beer game. The point of the game and examples should be shown in the instructor's manual, if not in the textbook itself. The authors may want to include a computerized version of the game or the locations of on‐line versions. Perhaps the authors did not give the beer game much emphasis as the students in the author's course may have played it in a prior course. However, this may not be the case with many other students.

In general, Chopra and Meindl's book is a good choice for a supply chain management course that has a quantitative emphasis. Its real‐life examples of supply chain management by well‐known companies keep the reading interesting. Concrete illustration of concepts using numerical examples is helpful in learning the concepts. The book is practical and provides a good balance of quantitative and qualitative issues in supply chain management. It would be an excellent book if the weaknesses that I mentioned here are addressed in a future edition.