These lectures provide transport economic concepts and theory that are useful for operations management. Though the word operations is in the title, it must be emphasised that these lectures don t discuss actual operations. As said, they concentrate on transport economic concepts and theory.
Operations managers are in the business of getting it right .
The products are to arrive at the customer in the right place, at the right time and in the right condition. If companies were willing to spend zillions of dollars on getting each single product in the right place, at the right time and in the right condition , operations management would be easy. However, operations managers are limited by their budget, and they have to operate in market conditions where their services are valued at certain prices. And thus it is important for the operations managers to understand basic economics - and transport economics in particular. Transport Economics is complicated, since next to time and quantity there now is distance, and there are the pecularities of the various modes of transport.