Supply Chain Analytics

Instructors: Rayan Bagchi & Genaro Gutierrez

TTH 2-3:30
Supply chain management has evolved as an extension of operations management, the extension being
an explicit consideration of issues involving the relationship between suppliers and customers. We
strongly believe that supply chain analytics professionals must have a strong grounding in operations so
that they can have both the confidence and credibility to collaborate fruitfully with other supply chain
professionals. The first half of the course is introduces the context for application of analytics in
operations. The second half of the course addresses use of analytics in supply chain management.
Operations involves those aspects of your firm that provide the goods or services in your firms value
proposition to your targeted market. As such, operations will be decisive in determining the long-term
viability of your firms business model. This fact has become even clearer in recent years as competition
has increased with more globalization and improved information technology. Firms such as Apple,
Toyota, and Wal-Mart have shown that good supply chain management makes good business sense.
The objective of this course is to provide you with an understanding of operations management and the
role that analytics can play in improving supply chain performance. By the end of the course, you should
be literate in the following aspects of operations management: process analysis, management of
waiting lines, process control, lean production, demand forecasting, inventory management, and
aggregate planning as well as have developed an ability to use some analytical tools and conceptual
frameworks to guide your thinking about operations in supply chains. It is important to realize that
much operations consists of the systematic design, operation, control and improvement of business
processes. Accordingly, you should leave this course able to:

Understand operations and supply chain management terminology and metrics;

Analyze key business processes;

Understand how variability impacts processes;

Rigorously improve business processes (including identifying the likely impact of information
technology);

Be able to combine historic demand data with contextual business and economic variables for
the preparation of demand forecasts;

Be able to use historical and contextual data to prepare top-down, bottom-up and middle out
supply chain demand forecasts, and be able to compare the effectiveness of each approach in specific
business contexts;

Understand the tradeoffs involved in aggregate production planning decisions and in the
deployment of inventories in distribution systems; and

Understand the costs and benefits of shaping demand and be able to combine advertising,
pricing and other interventions in the data-driven optimization of production and distribution decisions
in supply chains.

The course is a mixture of case analysis, individual (skill-development) problem sets, group homework
assignments, a group project, and midterm and final examinations.

Marketing Analytics I
Instructor: Garrett Sonnier (Marketing)
TTh 3:30-5:00pm
Marketing Analytics refers to the science of identifying patterns and relationships within primary and
secondary data to develop, implement, and assess marketing strategies. This first of the two-course
sequence in Marketing Analytics will introduce you to a quantitatively oriented view of marketing
strategy. Topics will include company, customer, and competitive analysis, segmentation, targeting and
positioning, the marketing mix and mix response analysis. The goal of this course is to introduce you to
these topics.