Four More Topics You Can Teach with Network Design

After our post on nine topics you can cover with network design, some folks reminded us of a few more and we added to the list.

  1.  Project Management.  We cover project management in the context of network design.  But, if you wanted to cover it in more detail, you could use this as a launching point
  2. Net Present Value (NPV) or Return-on-Investment or Financial Analysis.  We have an exercise on calculating the NPV for an investment in new facilities.  Future suppl chain leaders will need to know how to do financial analysis.  Justifying the opening and closing of facilities is a big one.  But, many others things will have to investigated.  For example, should you add racks to your warehouse, should you invest in your fleet, should you buy more fork trucks, or should you replace aging equipment?
  3. Microsoft Access, Excel Pivot Tables, and Tableau.   Network design gives you a chance to teach students how to deal with large data sets.  This includes just working with the data as well as reporting on it.  An import skill is to be able summarize large data sets.
  4. Change management and Organizational Behavior.  When you make major changes in the supply chain, it personally impacts a lot of different people.  It is important to understand how different people may react to the change and how to manage this change in an organization.

If you think of new ones, please let us know.