Supply chain design is the foundation of strategic supply chain planning, a key for organizations to create value. As supply chains become more end-customer-focused and global, their design becomes paramount as a competitive differentiator.
The MIT Supply Chain Design Lab conducts innovative research to help organizations implement a value-driven, collaborative co-design process. We employ and develop visual analytics decision-support tools that enable intuitive interaction with quantitative methods to support a data-driven decision-making processes.
Research Areas
End-to-End Optimization
Global supply chains spanning multiple jurisdictions and support channels while serving diverse markets are increasingly complex to manage and design. Our research combines optimization, simulation, and machine learning methods for end-to-end optimization of complex global networks.
Design of Customer-Centric Supply Chains
Customer-centricity is a key requirement of supply chains today. We investigate trade-offs between logistics costs and customer performance to design data-driven, customer-centric supply chains with multiple differentiated channel strategies.
Supply Chain Design Incorporating Risk and Uncertainty
Disruption and uncertainty have all increased in the recent years, requiring new methods for integrating risk and resilience in supply chain designs. We combine scenario planning with enhanced optimization methods to develop supply chain design models that proactively incorporate risk and uncertainty, yield the highest performance across a range of scenarios and achieve highest returns on investment in resilience.
Sustainable Supply Chain Design
Sustainability has become a high priority for organizations worldwide, putting supply chains squarely in the spotlight. We use state-of-the art methodologies for evaluating the economic, social, and environmental costs of supply chains and incorporate them into broad network design models, leading to sustainable designs across all dimensions of the triple bottom line.
Our Educational Courses
We offer a variety of in-person and online professional development courses. Our courses incorporate lectures and case studies that place learning in realistic industry contexts. In addition, we use interactive applications, where learners can simulate various supply chain design strategies, inspired by the MIT culture of learning by doing.
We work with organizations to develop and teach professional development courses on supply chain design, tailored around their specific needs.
