Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation.

Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation Sunil Chopra, and Peter Meindl. NY: Prentice Hall, 2001.

Supply Chains to Virtual Integration Ram Reddy and Sabine Reddy. NY: McGraw Hill, 2001.

Reviewed by Menberu Lulu, Howard University, Washington, DC.

Fierce global competition, global markets, global sourcing, globally and regionally distributed production, and heightened customer expectation for quality and service characterize the state of business. The pressure to cut costs, to be efficient and agile across enterprises has forced business to adapt holistic approaches to managing and optimizing the supply chain. A supply chain is a group of firms that work together in a coordinated fashion to procure, manufacture and deliver finished products to customers. Supply chain management is a set of approaches utilized to plan, produce, coordinate, and deliver products, while satisfying multiple objectives such as maximized efficiency, maximized agility and flexibility, and maximized customer satisfaction. To borrow a mathematical notion, the two books reviewed here are mutually complementary. In the main, Chopra and Meindl provide a range of operations research models as tools for tactical planning and managing all aspects of the supply chain, while Reddy and Reddy present a framework for systems level structuring and integration of supply chains. Reddy and Reddy is best utilized to serve the information needs of managers and conceptualizers, while Chopra and Meindl is a full-fledged academic textbook.

The stated objective of Chopra and Meindle is to provide a solid understanding of the analytical tools necessary to solve supply chain problems. They have achieved this objective in six modules divided into fifteen chapters. Module topics include strategic framework for supply chain management, demand and supply planning, planning and managing inventories, logistics and information technology, supply chain coordination and the role of e-business, and financial factors influencing supply chain decisions. As a text, each chapter has the full complement of challenging qualitative questions, problems and cases. Self-learning is enhanced by numerous illustrative solved problems and spreadsheet models.

The strategic framework module provides an interesting and powerful theoretic construct for formulating supply chain strategies (degree of responsiveness) as a function of implied demand uncertainty. Efficient supply chain and responsive supply chain constitute the two extremes of the responsiveness spectrum. The zone of strategic fit is defined as a mapping of implied demand uncertainty spectrum into the responsiveness spectrum.