Supply Chains: A Manager's Guide

Chapter 5. Modeling the Supply Chain

The examples in Chapter 4 show that even the simplest of systems can generate surprisingly complex behavior. How, then, are managers to understand such complex business systems as supply chains and manage them effectively? The answer, in a word, is modeling. The only way to understand complex systems is to construct simplified models of them, play with the models to see how they work, and then apply what you learn to the real-world system. You may not have thought about it this way, but you already do this with conceptual models all the time, even if the models are only in your mind. This chapter shows you how to use these mental models more effectively, and it introduces two more powerful kinds of models—mathematical ...