Procurement forms the strategic backbone of supply chain management, shaping the organization’s cost structure, operational responsiveness, and long-term competitive advantage. This module offers a rigorous examination of procurement as both a tactical function and a strategic capability. It introduces the foundational make-or-buy decision, exploring how outsourcing influences supply chain surplus, risk exposure, and organizational focus on core competencies. Learners develop a structured understanding of strategic sourcing frameworks, including category segmentation, supplier positioning, global sourcing trade-offs, and the interplay between efficiency and responsiveness. The module further delves into the supplier selection and evaluation process, covering requirement definition, sourcing analysis, RFx mechanisms, supplier scorecards, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as a decision tool. The final component—contracts and negotiation—equips learners with conceptual and analytical tools to design contractual mechanisms, manage power dynamics, allocate risks, and align incentives across supply chain partners. Through an academically rigorous yet industry-relevant approach, the module builds analytical depth, decision-making capability, and strategic fluency in procurement management.

Logistics is the operational core of supply chain execution, ensuring the efficient flow of materials, products, and information from origin to consumption. This module provides a structured examination of logistics functions, covering transportation, warehousing, inventory movement, and order fulfilment as integrated components of supply chain performance. Learners explore the determinants of logistics effectiveness—including product characteristics, facility location, infrastructure, and policy—while assessing how logistics decisions shape cost, responsiveness, and customer experience. The module also investigates transportation modes, network design choices, and trade-offs that influence both efficiency and service levels. Warehousing is examined as a process- and technology-driven system, focusing on layout design, operational workflows, KPIs, and the increasingly pivotal role of advanced automation and robotics. Finally, the module highlights how digital tools such as WMS platforms, routing algorithms, visibility systems, and telematics enhance operational planning, coordination, and decision-making. Overall, this module equips learners with analytical frameworks and practical tools to design, evaluate, and optimize logistics systems in dynamic and technology-enabled supply chains.

Advances in digital technologies are fundamentally reshaping the design, coordination, and execution of modern supply chains. This module provides a rigorous, process-centric understanding of how emerging technologies enable superior planning, sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, and returns management. It begins by situating technologies within the five core supply chain processes—Plan, Source, Make, Deliver, and Return—and demonstrates how analytics (descriptive, predictive, prescriptive) convert raw data into actionable insights throughout the network. Learners explore the role of artificial intelligence, machine learning, control towers, and digital twins in enhancing planning precision and strategic sourcing decisions. The module then examines how Industrial IoT, robotics, automation systems, and smart warehouses transform manufacturing and fulfilment by enabling real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, improved quality, and faster order processing. Finally, the module introduces frameworks for evaluating technology investments, including TCO, ROI, EVA, payback period, and risk-adjusted business cases, equipping learners to critically assess the long-term strategic and financial value of digital transformation. Through theoretical models, industry examples, and analytical frameworks, the module cultivates the capability to understand, evaluate, and leverage digital technologies as enablers of agile, resilient, and data-driven supply chains.

Sustainability and risk management are now strategic imperatives in global supply chains, driven by increasing volatility, environmental pressures, and heightened expectations of social responsibility. This module offers a rigorous examination of how organizations build supply chains that are resilient, sustainable, and circular while effectively managing complex global risks. The module begins with risk-based production scheduling, showing how firms in short product life-cycle industries use hybrid sourcing and flexible planning to navigate uncertainty. It then advances to supply-chain resilience, analyzing how visibility technologies, supplier diversification, flexible manufacturing, buffering, and collaboration strengthen a firm’s capacity to withstand and recover from disruptions. Learners also engage with the principles of supply-chain sustainability, using the Triple-P and ESG frameworks to understand how environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and long-term economic viability converge within responsible operations. The module further explores circular supply chains, emphasizing design for reuse, reverse logistics, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and material recovery as pathways to waste minimization. Finally, it addresses global supply-chain risk management, examining geopolitical, regulatory, environmental, and technological risks alongside mitigation strategies such as redundancy, analytics, and agility. Collectively, the module equips learners with the analytical and strategic capabilities to design supply chains that are adaptable, ethical, resource-efficient, and resilient in a rapidly changing global context.