Content area
Full Text
Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation Sunil Chopra, and Peter Meindl. NY: Prentice Hall, 2001.
Supply Chains to Virtual Integration Ram Reddy and Sabine Reddy. NY: McGraw Hill, 2001.
Fierce global competition, global markets, global sourcing, globally and regionally distributed production, and heightened customer expectation for quality and service characterize the state of business. The pressure to cut costs, to be efficient and agile across enterprises has forced business to adapt holistic approaches to managing and optimizing the supply chain. A supply chain is a group of firms that work together in a coordinated fashion to procure, manufacture and deliver finished products to customers. Supply chain management is a set of approaches utilized to plan, produce, coordinate, and deliver products, while satisfying multiple objectives such as maximized efficiency, maximized agility and flexibility, and maximized customer satisfaction. To borrow a mathematical notion, the two books reviewed here are mutually complementary. In the main, Chopra and Meindl provide a range of operations research models as tools for tactical planning and managing all aspects of the supply chain, while Reddy and Reddy present a framework for systems level structuring and integration of supply chains. Reddy and Reddy is best utilized to serve the information needs of managers and conceptualizers, while Chopra and Meindl...