The book provides a professional audience with state-of-the-art concepts that are important for the design, control, operation, and management of supply chain systems. In particular, the authors attempt to convey the intuition behind many key supply chain concepts and to provide simple approaches that can be used to analyze various aspects of the supply chain.

Reference to related work by the authors

The book is intended to bring the same thought-leadership to the professional market that the award-winning "Designing and Managing the Supply Chain" contributed to the educational market.

The educational version has been the best-selling book in supply chain management since its publication in 1999, winning the Book-of-the-year award and the Outstanding IIE Publication award given in 2000 by the Institute of Industrial Engineers, as well as the Outstanding First Edition of the Year Award given in 2000 by McGraw-Hill. Business 2.0 selected the book in December 2001 "as the best source for slashing time and costs and increasing productivity in the supply chain." The book has been translated into Chinese (both in China and Taiwan), Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.

While avoiding industry jargon and the hyperbole often used by logistics consultants, this book guides the reader with clarity and purpose through many supply chain aspects, from order fulfillment to logistics network optimization, through order forecasts and product design.

A common theme of this book is the need for global optimization across all corporate functions, all warehouses or locations, and across companies that share the same supply chains.