About the course
In this business and management course, you will learn how to make effective supply chain decisions that take into consideration all aspects of your business.
The course will take a helicopter view of decision-making. The helicopter view is built upon:
- Key questions to decide on: manufacturing organisation, late differentiation, location, distribution networks
- Objectives relevant to your business: cost, speed, flexibility, reliability
We will work through questions such as:
- Should you locate a process in a given country? This decision has an obvious impact on your HR costs, but it also affects your working capital and your ability to react to the market needs.
- Should you centralise your distribution? This decision leads to economies of scale and a better product availability, but it also impacts your carbon emission.
By the end of this course, you will have built a framework that allows you to make better decisions.
What you will learn
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- recognise key questions in the design and management of a supply chain;
- identify the possible options and solutions to key questions, along with their strengths and weaknesses;
- translate the company strategy into a clear decision-making framework;
- make strategic decisions based upon this framework.
About the instructor
Pierre Semal has been a full-time professor at the Louvain School of Management (UCL, Belgium) since 1994.
He teaches Supply Chain Management and related subjects at the Master’s and Executive levels in many different countries: Germany, France, Finland, China, Russia, and the US. His research interests include performance evaluation and supply chain optimisation.
He holds a Master’s degree in Engineering and a PhD degree in Computer sciences, both from Louvain. In 2012, he was awarded DHC from VMU, Lithuania. From 1979 until 1994, he served for Philips in research labs in Belgium and Germany.
Duration: 6 weeks, 6-8 hours per week
Language: English
Instructor: Pierre Semal
Institution: Université Catholique de Louvain
