Managing the Value Chain / Supply Chain Management --- Managing a company's critical performance dimensions - quality, speed, flexibility, and cost - warrants a thorough understanding of both the physical and information processes that are required for developing and producing goods and services and delivering them to the customers throughout the firm's value chain. This course focuses on managerial tools for understanding these processes and prepares the managers to use the results of analysis to constantly improve the firm's operational performance. The course then looks at the challenge and practice of managing and coordinating the entire chain of activities that serve to provide value efficiently and effectively to end-users, between networks of firms rather than single-organizations.