Content area
Full Text
Book review Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation Sunil Chopra and Peter Meindl Prentice-Hall 2001 457 pp. ISBN 0-13-026465-2 Review DOI 10.1108/02656710310461350
As supply chain management has been gaining recognition as an important area of competitive strategy, the last few years saw a flurry of new textbooks on the subject. Most of those books focus on managerial strategies. Chopra and Meindl's book, Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation, is a comprehensive introduction on supply chain management with a unique analytical focus. This book is ideal for a higher-level course with an emphasis on quantitative analysis and practical applications of concepts.
The contents of the book are as follows. The book is organized into six parts and further divided into fifteen chapters. In part one, consisting of three chapters, Chopra and Meindl establish a strategic framework for analyzing supply chains. This includes definitions and examples of supply chains, relationships between supply chain strategy and a firm's competitive strategy, and drivers and obstacles of supply chain performance. The key drivers are described as inventory, transportation, facilities, and information. Part two discusses how to plan supply and demand. The three chapters in this part cover forecasting, aggregate planning, and managing variability in supply and demand. Part three is on inventory management. The three chapters in part three discuss cycle inventory, safety inventory, and determining the level of product availability. Part four, in three chapters, covers transportation, network...