Supply Chain Analytics

Welcome to Supply Chain Analytics — your entry point into a fascinating and fast-growing field. This course lays the foundation and maps out your path through the full Supply Chain Analytics specialization. You'll build critical thinking and problem-framing and solving skills in supply chain management through real-life examples, learn to quantify the financial impact of supply chains and measure their efficiency. You'll see how data analytics — paired with visual storytelling — can illuminate pain points across every domain of a supply chain, and how to work with AI as a powerful analytical partner. Along the way, you'll also learn about the opportunities, salary statistics, and latest skill requirements shaping today's supply chain job market. Upon completing this course, you will be able to: 1. Understand supply chain challenges and why data analytics, including data-driven problem framing and solving, are critical to addressing them. 2. Quantify the financial impact of supply chains, especially how small operational shocks can cascade into big financial consequences. 3. Measure overall supply chain efficiency using the cash conversion cycle. 4. Apply critical thinking and visual storytelling to diagnose pain points across supply chain domains (source, make, move, and sell) and prescribe analytics to relieve them. 5. Understand supply chain job opportunities, salary statistics, and the latest market requirements. This course is for you if: 1. You're exploring a career in data analytics and supply chain management. 2. You work in supply chain or operations and want to upskill your data analytics capabilities. 3. You want to apply data analytics and critical thinking skills to define and solve problems in supply chain operations. I hope you enjoy the course!

Welcome to Demand Analytics - one of the most sought-after skills in supply chain management and marketing! Through the real-life story and data of a leading cookware manufacturer in North America, you will learn the data analytics skills for demand planning and forecasting. Upon the completion of this course, you will be able to 1. Improve the forecasting accuracy by building and validating demand prediction models. 2. Better stimulate and influence demand by identifying the demand drivers (e.g., time, seasonality, price, and other environmental factors) and quantifying their impact. AK is a leading cookware manufacturer in North America. Its newly launched top-line product was gaining momentum in the marketplace. However, a price adjustment at the peak season stimulated a significant demand surge which took AK completely by surprise and resulted in huge backorders. AK faced the risk of losing the market momentum due to the upset customers and the high cost associated with over-time production and expedited shipping. Accurate demand forecast is essential for increasing revenue and reducing cost. Identifying the drivers for demand and assessing their impact on demand can help companies better influence and stimulate demand. I hope you enjoy the course!

Welcome to Supply Chain Analytics — the art and science of designing and optimizing supply chains using data analytics. A supply chain is a complex system with conflicting objectives of cost efficiency and customer satisfaction. Supply chain management is becoming increasingly data-driven. Through the real-life story and data of a major U.S. telecommunications company, you will learn the analytics tools and skills needed to design and optimize a supply chain. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to: 1. Use data analytics to assess the impact of various strategies across all aspects of a supply chain — from inventory, shipping to warehouse order fulfillment and store operations. 2. Customize supply chain strategy by product to improve overall cost efficiency without sacrificing customer service. 3. Gain hands-on experiences on the application of data analytics to the integrated supply chain and logistics planning. VASTA (name disguised) is a major U.S. wireless carrier that distributes and sells phones through a large national network of retail stores. In recent years, the company has written off large volumes of obsolete inventory annually, driving significant cost inefficiencies in an increasingly stagnant and saturated market. To remain competitive, VASTA must reassess its competitive position and redesign its supply chain. By the end of this course, you will have developed strategies to help VASTA save billions of dollars in supply chain costs and defend its market leadership. I hope you enjoy the course!

The real world is messy. Analyzing and decomposing complex business situations to identify and prioritize the right problems to solve is often the biggest challenge — and one of the most valuable human skills in the age of AI. American Airlines (AAL), one of the world's largest airline groups and an S&P 500 company, is a great example. With its stock price growth rate ranked at the bottom of all major US airlines, AAL is clearly in trouble. What are AAL's key problems, and how can the company — and its stock price — be turned around? Addressing the challenge faced by AAL is a large-scale management consulting project. To start, business intelligence and competitive analysis (or competitive intelligence for short) are needed to identify the key levers and isolate the issues with the greatest financial stakes. In this course, you will gain the knowledge, skills, and experience in data analytics, benchmarking, and storytelling needed for effective competitive intelligence. Upon completion of the course, you should be able to discover and prioritize problems like a management consultant, for companies of your choice. Note: To gain hands-on experience in competitive intelligence via data analytics, you need to put these skills into practice. To this end, this course uses a free external website for you to apply what you've learned.

Inventory analytics is the corner stone of supply chain analytics. A company in trade industries may have 30-50% of their assets tied up in inventory. An effective inventory management can improve revenue by increasing product variety and availability, and reduce cost and speed up cash cycle by reducing excessive inventory and waste. Through real-life examples (e.g., Macy’s vs. Ross Stores), you will learn hands-on tools and skills to discover and solve inventory problems by data analytics. Upon completion, you can answer the following questions: 1. For which industries is inventory important and relevant? 2. How may inventory drive a company’s financial performance? 3. How do I know that I have an inventory problem? 4. How to classify inventory and manage it accordingly? Note: This course is for beginners and practitioners, and so it provides practical data-driven analytics for business inventory management, including inventory metrics, inventory problem diagnosis, the financial impact of inventory, and practical techniques of inventory management, rather than the mathematical models of inventory control that you can find in many other courses.