Serves as introduction to the discipline, and provides an overview of the pivotal elements of the supply chain management program. Provides students with strategic insights into managing supply chains and a solid basis for understanding the subsequent elements of the program.

A firm’s competitive strategy establishes the set of customer needs to be addressed by the products and/or services that it offers. A firm’s supply chain strategy establishes how these offered products/and or services are transformed from inputs in the hands of suppliers to outputs in the hands of end users. Unfortunately, in the past twenty years designing and managing supply chains has become increasingly complex. Most companies now face fierce competitive environments together with geographically dispersed suppliers and customers. These developments have rendered supply chain management a key strategic imperative for contemporary business and non-business organizations. To make matters more challenging (and exciting!) we find ourselves living through the emergence of a set of technologies that are changing the relationship between the physical and the digital world. New technological possibilities in the field of additive manufacturing, the internet of things, blockchain, or artificial intelligence are and will continue to transform the possibilities afforded to supply chain management. In parallel, these developments have also underpinned the emergence of the supply chain professional, a manager required to possess certain types of skills and capabilities. Chief among them is the ability to understand the main strategic issues involved in coordinating the entire value chain that allows companies to execute and re-configure effective business models. To develop such an understanding is what this course aims to achieve. The course introduces students to the main themes involved in thinking strategically about supply chains and to the most recent academic knowledge on said themes. As a result, students will develop a solid basis for conceiving and implementing sound supply chain decisions. As a side effect, students will also learn how to extract relevant findings from academic papers and identify their applicability to contemporary managerial challenges.

The literature for the course mainly consists of scientific articles published in the most respected supply chain management journals. The articles were carefully selected to provide students with recent overviews of the topics covered in the course. Because the articles come from very prestigious journals, some of them may deploy complex research methodologies with which students are unfamiliar. Even though students are invited and encouraged to challenge themselves, this is not a methodology course. In this sense, students should not be overly focused on the methods used by each paper, but rather on the implications of the results derived through the methods. Students are expected to apprehend the topical relevance of the papers, to become informed by their literature reviews, to consider the advantages and disadvantages of their research contexts, to understand the reported results and to reflect on their practical significance. This means that if a certain methodology (e.g. a statistical model) is beyond students’ current capabilities they should allocate their attention to the other sections of the paper.

Courses and workload are very demanding for all IB Master courses. Exchange students need to have obtained a Bachelor degree in business. Exchange students need to major in supply chain management/ logistics in their Master.
An advanced level of English