Supply chain managers watch the price of oil carefully.  The price of oil is closely related to the price of diesel fuel and that is closely correlated to total transportation spend.  An IBM blog post provides additional information on how this impacts the supply chain and a link to a nice article in The Wall Street Journal on the same topic.

In the book, we provide a mini-case study showing how oil prices impact diesel costs.   The following scatterplot shows the raw data– the weekly price of oil vs the weekly price of  diesel for 300+ observations.

This case study as well as the links above provide a nice introduction to the impact of oil prices on the supply chain.