Supply Chain Management Fundamentals

Supply Chain Management Fundamentals

Learn what it takes to be a successful supply chain manager. This course will prepare you for internationally recognized certification examinations by teaching you how to create demand forecasts, develop schedules, manage inventory, control production orders, and ensure customer satisfaction.

6 Weeks Access / 24 Course Hrs
  • Details
  • Syllabus
  • Requirements
  • Instructor
  • Reviews
$135.00

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$135.00
Self-Guided

Details

Supply chain management professionals play a key role in capturing customer demands, creating forecasts, developing schedules, ordering and managing inventory, controlling production orders, and maximizing customer satisfaction. This course will help you succeed in the supply chain management field.

You'll master the fundamentals of supply chain management, including customer demand forecasting, master production scheduling (MPS), material requirements planning (MRP), capacity planning, and production activity control (PAC). The course also includes essential information to help you prepare for internationally recognized supply chain and materials management certification examinations.

Syllabus

This lesson will discuss professional certification, and you'll get acquainted with APICS, the professional society for supply change management (SCM) practitioners. You'll find out about the concept of an operating system and the use of a supply chain. You'll also learn about Material Resources Planning (MRPII) and the role that it plays in an organization.

MRPII creates a logical structure for information, activities, and material to flow. While beneficial, MRPII represents only half of what an organization needs to succeed. In this lesson, you'll see the other half of the picture—Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP). It's a dynamic process that can make your company a world-class organization. You'll learn how to successfully use S&OP, identify key focus areas, and appreciate the benefits of following the S&OP cycle.

In this lesson, you'll examine forecasting—defined as a prediction based on scientific observation. You'll explore the history and nature of forecasting and learn about customer demand. You'll discover how to set forecasting objectives and create a process to develop and update weekly or monthly forecasts.

In this lesson, you'll examine the components of demand: averages, linear trend, seasonality, and cyclical, irregular, and random factors. The lesson will cover many qualitative forecasting techniques, including the Delphi method, panel consensus, and historical analogy. You'll learn about quantitative forecasting by working on problems involving time series (simple and weighted moving average and exponential smoothing) and associative methods (linear regression and multiple regression analysis). You'll start to get a sense of which forecasting methods to use for which situations.

This lesson will conclude the discussion of forecasting. You'll find out about macroforecasting and two forecasting techniques that really fit in the quantitative or qualitative categories: focus forecasting and pyramid forecasting. You'll discover how to develop forecasts for new products, and learn how to use techniques to effectively control your forecasts before they get too far off track.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to develop and use a Gantt chart, examine basic scheduling principles, and discover how to overcome production schedule challenges. You'll also learn how to use priority rules to sequence work orders, use shop loading, and manage work orders. Finally, the lesson will teach you all about lead-time. You'll learn to identify its components and about how you can successfully control it.

The topic of this lesson is the master production schedule (MPS). An MPS breaks down the production plan in greater detail. To manage your MPS effectively, you'll need a master scheduler. The lesson will teach you about how the master scheduler converts the production schedule to an MPS, applies a final assembly schedule, and uses available-to-promise (ATP) to satisfy customer orders. You'll also learn how critical it is to measure and control your MPS and methods to keep it moving in the right direction.

The process called material requirements planning (MRP) is one of the great inventions of the 20th century. In this lesson, you'll discover how MRP can help your company. You'll learn about the basics—dependent demand, bills of materials, and inventory records—and study the various reports and schedules. You'll also find out how to lot-size MRP orders and what it takes to implement MRP.

To succeed with capacity planning, you must manage the present and the future. You need to balance flexibility (being able to meet new and diverse needs in different ways) with capability (doing what you must do now). In this lesson, you'll learn about the goals and requirements to effectively manage capacity. You'll also discover how to use strategic capacity management, rough-cut capacity planning (RCCP), and capacity requirements planning (CRP) to define, plan, measure, and control output.

The last four lessons will discuss production activity control (PAC). PAC is vital because it activates all of your plans, including the MPS, MRP, and your capacity plan. You'll look at the PAC cycle and its requirements and benefits, then learn how to apply backward and forward scheduling, manage bottlenecks, and optimize set up management. The lesson will also cover linear programming as a way to schedule products when you face supply and demand constraints.

In this lesson, you'll examine another method with an acronym: production scheduling and control (PSC). PSC is the part of PAC that carries out your planning, going all the way back to the business plan. By the time you finish this lesson, you'll know how to develop and use a Gantt chart, understand basic scheduling principles, and know how to overcome production schedule challenges. You'll also learn how to use priority rules to sequence work orders, use shop loading, and manage work orders.

In this final lesson, you'll learn all about lead-time. The lesson will identify its components and discuss how you can successfully control it. You'll finish the course by studying operation overlapping as a way to improve production and keep materials flowing smoothly.

Requirements

Prerequisites:

There are no prerequisites to take this course.


Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

  • This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

  • PC: Windows 8 or later.
  • Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
  • Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
  • Adobe Acrobat Reader.
  • Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

  • Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

Instructor

Tony Swaim

Tony Swaim has helped many clients, colleagues, and students reach their professional and personal goals. He has been an online instructor since 1998 and has taught at colleges and universities across the United States since 1981. His focus areas are project management, Six Sigma, and supply chain management. Tony manages a successful consulting firm, and his industry experience includes 20 years of supply chain management. He earned a Doctorate in Business Administration from Kennesaw State University and holds professional certifications in six disciplines, including the Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI)® and Certified Six Sigma Black Belt (CSSBB)® from the American Society for Quality (ASQ)®.

Reviews

Great class! Excellent material and presentation. This class has been a tremendous benefit to me. I can apply the lessons learned in this class to my current and future work environment. I look forward to more classes covering this topic. Thank you very much for providing excellent material and the presentation.

It was definitely a good course and I would recommend it to others interested in the topic.

I want to thank to the professor and for his interest in all the practical exercises and examples given. They will be a great support in my career.

I thought that the course was well prepared and thought out. There was a lot of ground to cover in the material presentation.

The course was enlightening and opened my eyes to the causes of many of the problems that are negatively affecting our current service level.

The course was great. The information I received was beneficial and strengthened my knowledge within the field of manufacturing. I enjoyed the class.

This course gave me a solid foundation in SCM and will enhance my ability to support my company's supply chain organization.

This course really got me to see how complicated this process is. I learned a lot from taking this course and looking forward to the next one.

This was an excellent refresher course for me. I think that the instructor and course material was very good and timely. I enjoyed it and learned a great deal after 20+ years in the field myself.

I am in Kuwait taking this course so my online interaction was nil, mostly due to the time difference & the long hors that I work! I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this course though & I hope my next course will be just as good! The instructor was great as well!

Self-Guided Course Code: T9624
Instructor-Moderated Course Code: scf