Any product in the market can effectively reach to consumers only if the supply chain designed to deliver this product works efficiently. For instance, a computer manufacturer sells products to U.S. market, it receives chips and electronic parts from overseas. Such a supply chain construction is inevitable due to economical reasons (overseas may provide cheaper parts), however, shipment delays become significant and transportation disruptions can put the American company into difficulty in responding to its customers effectively. In the contrary, due to delays, unnecessarily large number of products may accumulate as well, especially by the time products arrive to the stores the consumer demand might be low. This causes stocking problems and the company will loose money to get rid of these extra products by offering sales.

It is therefore very imporatnt to investigate how shipment and transportation delays may affect the number of products in the inventories. If we can understand how these effects play role in the inventory levels, then we can also find ways to propose better supply chain management strategies, which can ultimately save companies millions of dollars.

The research activity to be performed is summarized as follows. First of all, the students will be asked to pick their favorite commerically available product. Next, the students will investigate what components when they get together form this product and the geographic location of each component will be identified (U.S., Europe, Asia, etc.). Students will then draw a supply chain map and lay out the shipment times. This will be a map showing how products flow and affect multiple inventories of the company. Next, we will study different scenarios via computer simulation softwares. Some scenarios are: (1) what if a storm happens and no products arrive from overseas;(2) what if the consumer demand goes up suddenly, the manager orders new products to respond to consumers, but by the time the new products arrive to the stores it is too late because the consumer demand went down; (3) what if two companies collaborate and whichever has too many products, it sells these extra products to the second company at a reduced cost.