Operations and Supply Chain Management

Citation

Heizer, J., Render, B., & Munson, C. (2026). Operations and Supply Chain Management (15th ed.). Pearson.

Chapter Summary

The publisher's contents list four parts: three parts of chapters, with supplements interleaved after some chapters, and a fourth part of business analytics modules. Seventeen chapter titles appear in Parts 1–3, together with four supplements, seven analytics modules and five online tutorials. Pearson says the text is organised around ten operations strategy decisions, and that the fifteenth edition adds a new focus on supply chain management, new supply chain and AI material and problems, and a running video case on the rebuilding of Oregon State University's football stadium.

Part 1, Introduction to Operations Management: Operations and Productivity; Operations Strategy in a Global Environment; Project Management; Forecasting

Four chapters open the book with what operations management is and how productivity is measured, how operations strategy is set in a global setting, and two planning tools that serve everything later, project management and forecasting.

Part 2, Designing Operations: Design of Goods and Services; Managing Quality; Process Strategies; Location Strategies; Layout Strategies; Human Resources, Job Design, and Work Measurement

Six chapters follow the design of the operation: the goods and services themselves, quality, process choice, where to locate, how to lay out facilities, and the human side. Three supplements are interleaved: Sustainability in the Supply Chain (Supplement 5), after the product design chapter; Statistical Process Control (Supplement 6), after the quality chapter; and Capacity and Constraint Management (Supplement 7), after the process strategies chapter.

Part 3, Managing Operations: Supply Chain Management; Inventory Management; Aggregate Planning and S&OP; Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and ERP; Short-Term Scheduling; Lean Operations; Maintenance and Reliability

Seven chapters cover running an operation: the supply chain, inventory, aggregate planning with sales and operations planning, MRP and ERP, short-term scheduling, lean operations, and maintenance and reliability. Supplement 11, Supply Chain Management Analytics, follows the supply chain chapter. The sequence moves from long-range planning to the day-to-day control of work.

Part 4, Business Analytics Modules: A. Decision-Making Tools; B. Linear Programming; C. Transportation Models; D. Waiting-Line Models; E. Learning Curves; F. Simulation; G. Applying Analytics to Big Data in Operations Management

Seven modules collect the quantitative methods that support the earlier chapters, from decision tools and linear programming to transportation models, waiting lines, learning curves and simulation, and a closing module on big data.

Online tutorials

The contents list five online tutorials: Statistical Tools for Managers; Acceptance Sampling; The Simplex Method of Linear Programming; The MODI and VAM Methods of Solving Transportation Problems; and Vehicle Routing and Scheduling.

Key Concepts

Parts 1–2: Strategy and Design

• Productivity and operations strategy: the two opening chapters.
• Forecasting and project management: planning tools placed at the start.
• Quality and statistical process control: a chapter and a supplement.
• Process strategy, capacity and constraint management: process choice and its supplement.
• Location and layout: facility decisions.

Parts 3–4: Running Operations and Analytics

• Supply chain management and analytics: a chapter and supplement.
• Inventory management, aggregate planning, S&OP, MRP and ERP: the planning chain.
• Lean operations and maintenance and reliability: the final chapters.
• Linear programming, transportation models, waiting lines, simulation: the analytics modules.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A decision-based organisation. Pearson frames the book around ten operations strategy decisions, so the chapters read as decisions an operations manager makes, not as separate techniques.
• Quantitative tools are separated out. The analytics modules and online tutorials hold linear programming, transportation, waiting-line and simulation methods apart from the main chapters, so a course can include or skip them.
• Supply chain emphasis. Pearson says the fifteenth edition adds a new focus on supply chain management, and the contents give supply chain management, sustainability in the supply chain, and supply chain analytics their own headings.
• A running case. Pearson says a video case on the Oregon State University football stadium rebuild runs through the edition to show operations and supply chain management in action.

Limitations

• Breadth. Seventeen chapters, four supplements, seven modules and five tutorials are more than one course needs, and the book is best treated as a reference from which a course selects.
• Heavily quantitative methods are outside the main chapters. Readers who need linear programming or simulation must go to Part 4 or the online tutorials, and the simplex and MODI/VAM methods are among the tutorials.
• Little is shown about the AI material. The publisher mentions new AI material and problems, but the contents list does not say where in the book it appears.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is a full-length operations management text with a strong supply chain component. Slack, Brandon-Jones and Burgess's Operations Management presents operations as the part of every organisation that creates and delivers products and services, organised around directing, designing, delivering and developing operations, with examples from services and the public sector as well as manufacturing. Krajewski and Malhotra's Operations Management: Processes and Supply Chains is the closest comparison in scope, combining managerial discussion with forecasting, inventory, linear programming and waiting-line tools.

Hugos's Essentials of Supply Chain Management is a compact introduction to supply chain decisions, and Chopra's Supply Chain Management is an advanced, spreadsheet-based treatment of network design, planning and inventory. Hopp and Spearman's Factory Physics is a quantitative, principles-based account of how production systems behave and develops laws linking throughput, work in process, cycle time and variability.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduate business students in a required operations or supply chain course, MBA students who need the standard operations decisions and techniques, and analysts in logistics, manufacturing or service operations. Basic algebra and a first statistics course help, especially for forecasting, quality control and the analytics modules.

A practical plan:

• Core: Part 1, then the quality and process chapters in Part 2 with their supplements.
• Planning chain: Supply chain management, inventory, aggregate planning, MRP and scheduling in Part 3, read in that order.
• Methods: Choose analytics modules as the course needs them, and use the online tutorials for the simplex and transportation methods.
• Practice: Recreate the quantitative examples in a spreadsheet, and treat the lean and maintenance chapters as the place where the earlier decisions come together.