Matching Supply with Demand: An Introduction to Operations Management

I am an MBA student who has used this course book for our first year operations class. The book tackles difficult topics in a very easy to read way and is extremely well integrated with the associated case book and lecture notes. It provides the right level of detail, enabling students to pick up the tools or delve more deeply into the underlying mathematical constructs. The book does what it says on the label, teaching how to match supply with demand through analyzing process bottlenecks, queuing, lost customers, optimal inventory and yield management and supply chain management issues, such as the bull-whip effect and tackling double marginalization. This is a great introductory book to operations management.

I am currently attending an MBA program and we are using this book in one of our operations classes. Highly recommend this book to schools and students who would like to learn how to solve the supply and demand problem! First, this book is very easy to read. Throughout the book, the authors used different examples to illustrate the various challenges in realistic settings such as the patient waiting and serving time at the interventional radiology unit. The readers can easily extend and relate the examples in real life. Second, this book is good for the classroom setting as well as the self study setting. The book is organized in a way that each chapter is focused on one operations management problem and shows the systematic ways to solve the problem. For self learner, one can easily select the topics and chapters of his/her interest. Also, I found the summary at the end of each chapter especially useful for me. To prepare my exams, I use the summary of key notions and equations in each chapter to make up my "cheat sheet". Again, "Matching Supply with Demand" is a great book and I highly recommend it.

I found this text book to be extremely helpful in understand and applying operations management. It includes a comprehensive introduction into topics like process flow, estimating and reducing labor costs, batching, the impact of variability, projecting uncertain demand, reactive capacity, risk pooling and several others. More importantly, the models and examples used are not only practical, but actually interesting. Class discussions were drastically improved due to an increased interest in the cases. I'm sure it took a monumental effort to develop models and cases that make Operations Management interesting to the common student.

My experience with this book comes from teaching introductory Operations classes to MBA students at the Wharton School of Business. The book is unique in that it covers several exciting recent developments in Operations Management including such topics as revenue management, bullwhip effect, supply chain coordination and manufacturing flexibility. These issues are very well-received by students but so far have not been a part of any introductory Operations text I know of. Quantitative topics are explained using real-world examples with data coming from actual companies which allows for an entertaining read while preserving quantitative rigor of the material. Extensive sets of problems accompanying each chapter make the adoption process easy for instructors. Overall, this is a well thought-out book that has now been tested at Wharton for several years and hence has very few (if any) bugs that are so common in new textbooks.

I manage over 100 people in an Operations department for a large S & P 500 financial services company. I found this text to be extremely helpful. The material is clearly and logically presented, with ample use of real world examples that help drive the points home. I found the short summaries interspersed throughout the chapters particularly helpful, as they provided a snapshot reference of key ideas and methods. I have used the concepts within my organization to quantitatively analyze and improve our processes with considerable success, gaining significant efficiencies with bottom line impact. I highly recommend it.