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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Sales and operations Planning (Aggregate Planning)

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S&OP fills the gap between long-term strategic planning and shortterm planning and control. Through S&OP, firms can not only plan and coordinate efforts in their own functional areas—operations, marketing, finance, human resources, and so on—but also effectively communicate to other members of the supply chain what they expect to accomplish over the intermediate time horizon.
In this chapter, we described several approaches to S&OP and demonstrated the power of thetechnique. We discussed when and where top-down versus bottom-up planning can be used and showed three basic approaches to S&OP: level, chase, and mixed production.
We also touched on some of the qualitative issues surrounding S&OP: How do we select a plan? How can we use S&OP to foster agreement and cooperation among the various parties? How can we organize for S&OP?
We also argued for increased sharing of S&OP information across the supply chain. As information technologies become more sophisticated and organizations put more emphasis on the supply chain, we can expect to see more and more sharing of S&OP between supply chain partners. Finally, we ended the chapter with a discussion of how optimization modeling techniques can be applied to the S&OP process.


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