Supply chain engineering

Supply chain engineering is the engineering discipline that concerns the planning, design, and operation of supply chains. Some of its main areas include logistics, production, and pricing. It involves various areas in mathematical modelling such as operations research, machine learning, and optimization, which are usually implemented using software.

Supply chain engineering draws heavily from, and overlaps with other engineering disciplines such as industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, systems engineering, information engineering, and software engineering. Although it has the same goals as supply chain management, supply chain engineering is focused on a mathematical model based approach, whereas supply chain management is focused on a more traditional management and business based one. Supply chain engineering can be considered to include supply chain optimization, although the latter could also be done using more qualitative management-based approaches, which is less of a focus in supply chain engineering.

Applications

Supply chain engineering is applied to all parts of supply chains, including:

• Authentication and tracking, such as via RFID technology
• Financing
• Forecasting, particularly for demand
• Locating facilities
• Logistics for both goods and people
  • Transportation
  • Warehousing and inventory management
• Pricing
• Production and manufacturing

Techniques

Supply chain engineering uses a wide variety of mathematical techniques such as:

• Control theory, and particularly optimal control
• Optimization
• Forecasting
  • Time series analysis
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence
• Operations research
  • Flow network analysis
  • Inventory management
  • Routing

See also

• Supply chain finance (disambiguation)