Executive Education

Description
In the 21st century e-business environment, products can be outmoded within months and corporate market share is at risk on an almost daily basis. Supply chain choices are having an increasingly critical influence on strategic business outcomes.

A practice-oriented program, Supply Chain Strategy and Management investigates a new MIT framework for better managing supply chains in today's rapidly changing markets. The program explores:

• How to better structure your supply chain strategy
• Guidelines for making strategic sourcing and make-buy decisions
• How to integrate e-business thinking into supply chain strategy and management
• "Clockspeed benchmarking", a tool for deriving critical business insights and management lessons from industries with the highest obsolescence rates of products, process technologies, and organizational structures (industrial "fruitflies")
• Why all advantages in fast clockspeed environments are temporary

In the past, supply chain practice has been primarily tactical, but Supply Chain Strategy and Management presents a new and innovative approach to supply chain design. In this program, participants will reach a better understanding of:

• The role of supply chain design in business strategy and why, if you fail to link them, your supply chain design can undo your business strategy
• Forces that influence supply chain structure -- how supply chain structures change, how supply chain structures and industry structures overlap, and how these structures are affected by the speed of change in your industry
• Integrating supply chain design with product and process development -- how do you integrate your plans for product development with your plans for supply chain design
• Connecting supply chain design with supply chain management and logistics -- how can you imbed supply chain process management into project management
• Supply chains in the age of eBusiness

The Participant Team
Supply Chain Strategy and Management is for senior managers who are responsible for the general business and strategic management of product supply and development, including vice presidents of manufacturing, product development, and purchasing and distribution, and senior supply chain managers and project management executives in any company which manufactures or distributes products, including component manufacturers, contract manufacturing companies, semi-conductor manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, consumer goods manufacturers, telecom companies, financial services companies, and retailers who would like to control more of the supply chain.

Faculty
Faculty Leader: Charles H. Fine, Chrysler LFM Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, studies technology supply chains. Author of Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage, Fine focuses on assessing the present and future profitability and strategic leverage of the various sectors in the supply chain. He also concentrates on determining the boundaries and identity of an organization - designing a supply chain based on strategic as well as logistical assessment. In addition, he looks at assembling the capability to realize organizational boundaries of choice and to manage within and across those boundaries.

David Simchi-Levi, Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, focuses his research on analysis, development and implementation of robust and efficient techniques for the design, control, and operation of logistics systems. He is co-author of Designing and Managing the Supply Chain: Concepts, Strategies and Case Studies, winner of the Book-of-the-Year Award and Outstanding IIE Publication Award given in 2000 by the Institute of Industrial Engineers. He is also a co-author of the book The Logic of Logistics. Simchi-Levi has consulted and collaborated with numerous companies and organizations.