ABSTRACT
Perhaps the best way to set the tone for this chapter is to consider a hypothetical encounter that an industrial engineer or operations manager is likely to experience. It’s not quite the “guy walks into a bar” setup, but it’s close. Consider the following scenario: A software salesperson walks into the office of an industrial engineer and says, “I have some software to sell you that will optimize your supply chain.” Unfortunately, the punch line-which I’ll leave to the reader’s imagination-is not as funny as many of the “guy walks into a bar” jokes you’re likely to hear. In fact, there are some decidedly not-funny examples of what could happen when “optimizing” the supply chain is pursued via software implementations without careful consideration of the structure and data requirements of the software system. Hershey Foods’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation (Stedman, 1999) and Nike’s advanced planning system (APS) implementation (Koch, 2004) are frequently cited examples of what could go wrong. Indeed, without some careful thought and the appropriate perspective, the industrial engineer (IE) in our hypothetical scenario might as well be asked to invest in a bridge in Brooklyn, to paraphrase another old joke.
