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The premise of the case is how to make best use of customer shopping time while staying competitive and profitable: The increase in the number of ecommerce-based channels and the growth of Amazon and Wal^*Mart have forced brick-and-mortar retailers to seek alternative ways to reach potential customers in a cost- and time-efficient manner. In the U.S., an average of 0.74 hours per day is spent purchasing goods and services, while an average of 1.77 hours per day is spent doing household activities. Regardless of location, customers all have the same 24 hours in a day and only so much of it can be spent shopping.

One of the benefits of ecommerce has been an increase in product variety offered to customers. The online marketplace has enabled consumers in many industries to locate, evaluate and purchase a far wider variety of products than they can with traditional brick-and mortar channels. 30% to 40% of Amazon book sales are titles that wouldn't normally be found in brick-and-mortar stores.

EC-Creamery is an Eau Claire, WI based dairy processor selling yogurt products throughout the Midwest region of the U.S. Inaccurate forecasts have wreaked havoc in the company, leading to frequent stockouts and creating operational challenges. Your task is to draw on the information you obtain from your colleagues to develop sales forecasts, document your choices and procedures and share your thoughts and insights on issues related to forecasting and sales & operations planning.

The case of Bertelsmann China: Supply Chain for Books (A) focuses on one the world's leading media companies to illustrate a widespread problem in the supply chain strategy in extremely fast growing markets. Students learn about the basic challenges of supply chain strategy in an international context. The case covers important fields of management theory. Supply chain designs well as cost and performance drivers are revised by the use of frameworks.

The case of Bertelsmann China: Supply Chain for Books (B) is situated in China in the beginning of 2006. Bertelsmann Direct Group, the Chinese subsidiary of the worldwide Bertelsmann AG, is one of the leading book retailers in the country. Supply chain management is essential for success in retailing, which is why Bertelsmann puts a lot of effort into the optimization of its supply chain design. As costs are paramount to importance in the low-margin book retailing sector, linear programming methods are applied to optimize the network

This case study addresses a number of common transportation management issues. It provides an opportunity to analyse historical freight payment data in order to reduce transportation costs and improve customer service, allowing students to utilise real freight payment data and order shipment history data to make recommendations that have strategic implications for both cost and service performance.

BP has interest in both upstream and downstream segments in over 100 countries worldwide. The United States subsidiary of BP is the nation's largest producer of oil and gas. This case focuses on the upstream procurement activities in the Gulf of Mexico.

This case study has been developed to facilitate discussion about current supply chain management issues and potential solutions. The scenario presented in this case is very representative of the pressures experienced by supply chain managers. Namely, the need to reduce costs while maintaining quality and customer service. This case presents some unusual challenges and constraints that are unique to the cruise line industry. These constraints can provide an opportunity to explore new supply chain paradigms.

This case introduces offers the concept of cash-to-cash (C2C) and extension of the concept to facilitate supply chain finance improvements between trading partners by harvesting the inherent advantages (lower WACC, lower ICC) of one trading partner to reduce cost and benefit the entire supply chain.

This case illustrates the concept of consolidation and how freight forwarders use it to reduce transportation costs. The student must compare a ship-direct model against vehicular consolidation, then consider temporal consolidation, investigate the differences between a freight broker and a freight forwarder, and develop a rate analysis for use in negotiation.

This case study is designed to explore the challenges of forecasting and inventory management in spare parts industry. Most items in this industry have lumpy, intermittent, erratic and slow demand patterns. Traditional forecasting techniques cannot be applied to this group. Also most textbook methods on inventory planning, assumes the demand is normally distributed – which is also not the case in spare parts industry. Strategies can be tested for the demand data provide for about 40 items