Operations and Supply Chain Management for MBAs, 6th Edition , provides an introduction to the basic concepts of operations and supply chain management with a strategic, conceptual, and contemporary approach. Specifically written with the needs of MBA students in mind, current topics such as supply chain management, the balanced scorecard, and yield management, as well as those specific to marketing, finance and other majors are explained with less quantitative and more conceptual content. With a concise format, this text is designed to allow professors to tailor the course through supplementary cases and other materials for the unique nature of various MBA programs and student populations.
Good reading. Some quotes to highlight, many insights provided from this book, Author drive an excellent argumantation, with theory and practice to use.
"The primary method of project scheduling is based on two historical network approaches - program evaluation and review technique (PERT) and critical path method (CPM)."
"Supply chain planning has become much more sophisticated in the last decade and a large part of it is concerned with attempting to predict what the actual demand is going to be for the services or product. The good news is that we now have a much greater amount of data ("big data") to help us make this forecast, but the bad news is that we need substantially more powerful tools to analyze all this data."
Value Analysis "A special responsibility of purchasing, or purchasing working jointly with engineering/design and operations (and sometimes even the supplier), is to regularly evaluate the function of purchased items or services, especially those that are expensive or used in high volumes. The goal is to either reduce the cost of the item or improve its performance. This is called “value analysis” because the task is to investigate the total value of the item to see if it can be eliminated, redesigned for reduced cost, or replaced with a less expensive or more beneficial item, or even if the specifications can be relaxed. Other aspects are investigated, too, such as the packaging, the lead time, the transportation mode, the materials the item is made from, whether the part can be combined with another part or parts, and so on."
"The theory of constraints (TOC) (Goldratt 1990) offers a systematic way to view and analyze process flows."
Required for MBA. This isn't that great of a textbook, and is more of a reference book on operations. It really doesn't do a good job of teaching the reader anything, but instead brings up a lot of ideas and concepts (which are great to mull over), but I would have liked something more prescriptive.