All You Ever Wanted to Know About Supply Chains: Supply Chain Management by S. Chopra and P. Meindl

Sunil Chopra and Peter Meindl have recently updated their Supply Chain Management book (2. edition published by Prentice Hall). The new edition is more comprehensive than the previous edition; it includes basically two new chapters on Sourcing and Pricing and Revenue Management. Discussion of design options for a distribution network of Chapter 4 is also new material. The rest of the new edition is very similar to the first edition. This similarity between editions hopefully justifies me as a legitimate reviewer because I have used only the first edition in three sections of an elective 3-credit course at a business school. Practically, the class populations were split equally between MBA students and MS students. The students generally had above-average quantitative background with regard to ordinary business school students. My perspective on the book is partly shaped by my students’ reactions. I believe that this perspective is a healthy one as a “good book” should teach well to a novice reader. Below, I go over the book in detail and discuss what readers can and cannot find in the book. At times, I take the liberty of suggesting additions/deletions of some topics or reordering some topics. The new edition, like the old one, examines supply chains in six parts. The first part deals with Building a Strategic Framework to Analyze Supply Chains. This indeed is a good start to give a top-down view to readers. It starts a smooth transition from the qualitative discussions of an average business school course to more quantitative discussions of a supply chain course. Moreover, the students warm up with the subject matter while the three chapters of Part I are discussed. In Part I, the concept of a strategic fit between customer wishes and supply chain capabilities is very important. On the other hand, one can quickly skim over the sections of Process view of supply chain and Expanding strategic scope. The second part is mainly on logistics: location and transportation analysis. This part used to come after inventory chapters in the first edition. Since outcomes of infrequent decisions typically become inputs for frequent decisions, infrequent decisions should be discussed first, e.g. location decisions should come before inventory decisions. Ordering decisions (effectively chapters) according to frequency eliminates potential confusion as to how decisions are related and what is their relative chronology. Hence, I applaud authors’ decision to discuss logistics earlier. Location chapter includes interesting examples of inventory and transportation cost trade offs. These examples deserve a careful reading because they emphasize the concept of integration (system-view) which is a keystone for supply chain management. On the other hand, location (Chapter 5) and transportation (Chapter 14) could have remained next to each other. The relegation of transportation may be due to its inclusion of routing type combinatorial topics that may not be appropriate/interesting for some readers. Those readers may skip parts or all of the transportation chapter but the others can read the transportation immediately after the location. Speaking of the placement of chapters, I agree with the authors that network design decisions under uncertainty belong to Part II. This discussion was provided under the Financial evaluation chapter in the first edition. Authors use the methodology of decision trees to solve two examples here. With these examples, instructors may also illustrate how simulation can be used instead of decision trees. This is now made possible by an appendix in the new edition: Simulation using spreadsheets. If this appendix is pulled into Part II which seems possible with little effort, readers can be presented with a comparative discussion of decision trees and simulation. Such a comparison adds to the value of the book. It