MIT Supply Chain Management

Overview

MIT offers online courses in Supply Chain Management at edx.org. These have helped me immensely as I learned about supply chains, forecasting, inventory management, and supply strategy. These courses can be taken for free or a certified certificate can be obtained for a moderate fee. 3 of these courses (SC1, SC2, and SC3) count towards an X-Series Certificate. In 2015, MIT announced that two additional courses (SC0 and SC4) would be offered and, combined with the others, would award a Micro-Masters degree that counts towards a semester in MIT's Master's program.

This page contains presentations, notes, and supplemental material from those courses. Anyone can get access to the presentations, videos, and notes from these classes by enrolling (for free) in the course at edx.org. The supplemental materials (Masters Theses and Academic Papers) are only available to verified students, and that is the main content that I wanted to make available to others here.

Classes

SC0 – Supply Chain Analytics

Analytics foundation needed to be successful in the following classes. (This class was added in response to feedback that SC1 and SC2 were too challenging, mathematically). The course provides a foundation in statistics, regression, and optimization. It covers unconstrained, constrained, and MILP optimizations.

SC1 – Supply Chain Fundamentals

Introduction to forecasting, inventory management, and logistics. The forecast methods discussed cover all of those used in CAO and RDF. The inventory management principles cover methods used in CAO and AIP. Covers all of the information someone would need to build CAO or RDF/AIP.

SC2 – Supply Chain Design

Network optimization problems that can help you decide where to put new distribution centers and help remove bottlenecks in the supply chain. Also looked at the financial components of a supply chain including cash flow analysis for supply chain projects.

SC3 – Supply Chain Dynamics

Introduction to process analysis and continuous improvement to help improve supply chain operations. Also looked at global supply chains, ocean transport, tariffs, and resiliency.

SC4 – Supply Chain Technology

Data modeling, database design, and basic SQL. Showing how these can be used in supply chain analytics. Also examines ERP systems and discusses the trade-offs between build versus buy solutions.