Courses and Book

ISYE 4301 Supply Chain Economics

Textbook by Chen Zhou, “Supply Chain with Economics and Human Needs: Design and Analysis of Supply Chain Operations and Strategies,” by Chen Zhou, copyright by Chen Zhou, available at Barnes and Noble, Colored $30/copy on demand.

Download Supply Chain with Economics and Human Needs [pdf format]

Course Description: Supply chain converts and transports natural and intermediate materials to consumers as products or services to serve human well-being, including human needs. This course is about the strategies for firms to collaborate with their partners and compete in their markets using models in supply chain or economics. It involves qualitative discussions and quantitative models on incentives, pricing, supply quantity, differentiation, games, information, scale, share, certainty and speed. The unique feature of this course is to consider the human needs objective and the impact of human decisions in addition to the financial objectives. The two objectives in most cases align well. As the supply capacities increase, the potential for misalignment between these two objectives grows, such as in the food supply chain and healthcare supply chain.

ISYE 3104 Supply Chain Modeling: Manufacturing and Warehousing

Course Description: This course is to develop models for the design, operation and analysis of discrete flow systems exemplified in factories, service systems and warehouses. The flows can be materials, people or documents. More than half of the senior design projects involve discrete flows. We will apply probability, statistics, queuing, newsvendor and optimization to optimize the flow systems with multiple and sometimes conflicting key performance indicators. The first part is to model and analyze the flow system a system for given inputs for systems that are balanced, then unbalanced and finally uncertain. The second part is to plan and schedule the arrival and resources in the system. The third is to apply the flow models to warehouses.

ISYE 3803 Project Evaluation for People, Planet and Profit

This is a new course developed by Drs. Lowe, Thomas and Zhou. The course will develop methods connecting industrial and systems engineering projects to some concrete aspects of the social, environmental and economic issues.

Course Description: Human well-being includes physiological needs, social needs and economic needs. The physiological needs can include fresh air, water, food, health, free from attacks and safety on the job. The social needs can include friendship, community, connection, respect, and love. The economic needs include livelihood, education and others. These needs are related to social, environmental and economic needs, or people, planet and profit, commonly referred to the as the triple bottom line (3BL). Traditionally, project evaluations are based on financial terms only, which is part of the economic evaluation. However, more and more people and firms realized that such evaluations are insufficient. In this course, we will introduce the concepts of the triple bottom line, the project evaluations associated with the triple bottom line and apply the concepts to a specific project.