IT-Enabled Supply Chain Management (Autumn 2024)

Abstract

The course will enable the students to analyse a supply chain and identify solutions where information technology can optimise the collaboration between actors in the supply chain network.

Description

Supply chains connect businesses in global networks of collaboration to provide customers with services and products. Effective management of supply chains is highly dependent on up-stream and down-stream information sharing and on IT-infrastructures to capture, store and process information.

Enabling supply chain management through IT represents the exemplar instance of business process innovation in the increasingly global economy and it requires complex combinations of a wide portfolio of IT hardware, software and network technologies.

The course aims at enabling the student to analyse information processing requirements to support management of complex supply chains, to describe the role of IT hardware, software, and network technologies in enabling supply chain management and to help firms select and design IT solutions to support supply chain management.

The course covers classical supply chain topics like coordination across actors in the supply chain, optimizing supply chain performance, supply chain networks, planning and forecasting and pricing / revenue management for optimal supply chain surplus. It then introduces IT enabling technologies like decision support, business information and big data technologies, e-commerce and digital supply chain as well as Internet of Things technologies and applications.

Formal prerequisites

.There are no formal prerequisites for this course.

Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

• Describe down-stream and up-stream information flows and their role in supply chain management
• Describe and understand the role of various forms of IT systems and network technologies in enabling information flows in supply chains.
• Describe and recognise the opportunities and the challenges related to collaboration as firms engage in IT-related process innovation across a supply chain
• Analyse challenges and options related to vertical integration (granularity of information capture) as well as horizontal integration (sharing of information)
• Assess and criticize key practices of how information technology can be used to manage knowledge, enhance efficiency, enhance sustainability, aid in decision making, and create a strategic competitive advantage in supply chains.
• Analyse key impacts to supply chains caused by climate change and explain appropriate mitigation strategies.
• Analyze the CO2 footprint of a given supply chain.

Ordinary exam

Exam type:
B: Oral exam, External (7-point scale)
Exam variation:
B1I: Oral exam with time for preparation. In-house.