Institution
Kaunas University of Technology, School of Economics and Business

Web Site
https://seb.ktu.edu/

Factual description
The course “Logistics” is offered for students in bachelor students in the fields of management and economics. The supply chain is presented as a complex system in the course. The main issues of the supply chain from system perspective are related to the ripple effect and bullwhip effect. These concepts are especially relevant nowadays due to rapidly changing environment and disruptions (e.g. COVID-19 crisis). For example, variability in demand causes insufficient inventory levels, supplier failure causes the whole production processes to fail even if a single raw material is missing. During the course, students are encouraged to play an online video game “Wood supply chain game”, which allows them to better understand the mentioned concept and possible approaches to solve the problems. Another issue discussed in the course is related to the concept of “digital twins”. This approach is used to develop a computer simulation of supply chains, and to analyze what-if scenarios. During the courses, “agent-based modelling” methodology is presented by providing examples of food delivery and inventory management.
The course combines management and mathematical approached by the means of supply chains and methods in operation research. As the course is dedicated to the students in social sciences, algorithms are covered in the applicational level so that students can identify the problems the specific algorithm can solve. Moreover, the teachers provide case studies for problems such as chain design, raw material distribution, transportation routing, demand forecasting, etc.
In supply chain management the ethical dimension is important since it is related to profit and equal access to products. For instance, a warehouse can be placed in city to ensure shorter delivery time and more profit, however, in this case the suburb region has worse access to the products. Thus, there are different approaches for commercial and none profit companies, of how they should manage their supply chains and students discuss these approaches in the course.

Relevance in complex systems
The course material is dedicated to analyzing the supply chain and other problems in operation research field as a complex systems by considering different perspectives such as environmental effect, profit, cost efficiency, etc.

Strong points
The strong point of the course is the applied top-bottom approach when students are introduced to a problem in the field of logistics and discuss the methods to solve in the context of the presented problem. Also, the application of artificial intelligence methods to solve problems in logistics is also introduced in this course.

Transferability potential
The transferable points in general field can be the top-bottom teaching approach in which the methods to solve are analyzed in the context of the given problem.