Supply Chain Engineering Useful Methods and Techniques

"In particular, the new book by Dolgui and Proth is a welcome addition to the knowledge needed for the design of effective, productive supply chains, with an emphasis on useful methods and solution techniques. Indeed, the choice of topics covered by this book is a careful balance between the engineering solution of problems concerning the entire supply chain, such as pricing, outsourcing, and inventory management throughout the supply chain, and of problems concerning the components of the chain, such as manufacturing/service layout, flow line balancing, and warehouse management.  Both perspectives are essential  for success, since “a chain is as strong as its weakest link,” while at the same time “a chain must perform better than the sum of its individual elements.When I read and evaluated this book as a candidate for our students in the course Design and Control of Production and Manufacturing Systems this year, for both graduate and advanced undergraduate students, I needed to answer this question: What is the strongest attribute of this new book? Throughout the pages I found the answer (and ended up recommending it): These authors, both experts in the theory of supply chain engineering and innovators of algorithms and methods themselves, have been able to contain their deep knowledge of complex theory by understanding what industry truly needs, and have indeed presented it at the right level. There are still plenty of advanced and rigorous algorithms and techniques besides the concise summaries of advanced material and simpler solution approaches; hence, the more mathematical and the less analytical students, researchers, engineering practitioners and designers, managers and consultants will find relevant and necessary knowledge for success with their supply chains."Prof. Shimon Y. Nof, Production Planning & Control: The Management ofOperations, Francis & Taylor, 04 Jan 2012 “This book contributes to lessen the gap between academic methods and business activities by providing simple and systematic methods for a series of supply chain problems faced by real world decision makers and managers. The book accomplishes a triple objective for the reader: to provide the basic concepts and representation models for identified problems, to provide an actual view of businesses and to provide practical strategies to include market, competition and external context issues in management decisions.”  “The book will be certainly useful both for managers and the academic community, since students can use it for understanding how theory and conceptual solutions are applied in real life, and for practitioners who will find in this book a practical guide for application of modern methods to real-life problems.”Prof. Susana Relvas, European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 211, 2011, pp. 216–217 “The book chapters address, in parallel presentations, various aspects of supply chain engineering and management. In each chapter, the terminology is explained first, then the well established results reported in the literature are reviewed to “set the stage” for presentation of new results. In most cases the presentation of methods and technologies is illustrated with real-life examples.”“The book, which is written by the right authors, came at the right time to help the managers and other knowledge workers of the industrial organisations to become familiar with useful, usable and utilized methodologies and technologies which can contribute to improving the performance of theenterprise. At the same time, the work can be viewed as pointer to a very promising research direction for the academia people and researchers from system and industrial engineering. Consultants and software companies may get new inspiring ideas from this book.”Acad. Florin Gheorghe Filip, Studies in Informatics and Control, vol. 20, n° 3, 2011