An enterprise's profitability relies on its ability to deliver the products and services that customers want in a cost effective, timely and consistent way. In increasingly competitive and volatile markets, enterprises need a globally focussed, future looking vision for the logistics task, to maintain their competitiveness. Students undertaking this unit are provided a solid foundation in the language, concepts, techniques and principles that underlie the field of global logistics and supply chain management, as well as an understanding of the various components and interactions of the global logistics system. They develop an ability to evaluate how these concepts and components can contribute towards strategically effective and operationally efficient enterprises and supply chains, across a range of industries. Emphasis is given to the creation of customer satisfaction throughout current and likely future trends across all aspects of global logistics and the importance of risk management. Students are also given an overview of the quantitative techniques which support management decision making in the global logistics space.

This unit provides students with an understanding of global distribution strategy and the management of international freight, including express, freight forwarding, rail, trucking, air freight and ocean shipping. The unit covers underlying supply chain drivers of international trade flows and the demand for capacity in different distribution channels and freight transportation modes, as well as industry structure, institutional environment, customs and global market participation strategies. Building on this background, the unit equips students with strategic tools for profitable international logistics operations. The unit focuses on corporate strategies around fleet and network planning, entrepreneurship, business model and value chain analysis, revenue and cost management, as well as competitive strategy and negotiation in the B2B and B2C contexts. The material covered in the unit considers recent developments in global and regional economic activity, technological and environmental advancements and discusses implications for the various sectors and stakeholders in global distribution chains. This unit involves case studies, industry presentations and analysis from the perspectives of shippers, airlines, wholesalers, retailers, end customers, regulatory bodies and investors.

Procurement of goods and services is an essential business task that has traditionally targeted short-term supply cost reduction. Globalisation and outsourcing creates opportunities for enterprises to better align procurement with longer term corporate strategies. However, this requires collaboration and negotiation within and between organisations, rethinking the role of procurement teams and reconsidering the impacts of sourcing decisions. Stakeholder demands for greater corporate social responsibility require procurement teams to take a strategic approach to spend, category management and sourcing decisions, moving beyond regulatory compliance to facilitate environmentally and socially sustainable outcomes. Ethical and sustainable procurement and logistics creates value for organisations by protecting brand integrity and improving communication, productivity, performance measurement, innovation and supplier diversity. This unit takes a strategic view of procurement, looking beyond the up-front costs and showing how purchasing decisions that consider resilience, entire life cycle costs, environmental and social risks and benefits provide better value. This requires rethinking the involvement of the procurement teams in the design, manufacture, selling and recycling of products and transformation of logistics management practice. Students practice negotiation in realistic industry workshops and gain new insights into effective and persuasive communication for global logistics and supply chain management.

Supply chains are typically designed to handle minor risks in supply and demand. Increasingly complex supply chains leave businesses vulnerable to abnormal events and disruptions, including natural disasters, supplier failure, cyber security threats and wide scale threats such as pandemics and climate change. Despite this, supply chains are an essential service and play a crucial economic and humanitarian role in times of crises. Supply chains are also undergoing structural change due to evolving consumer demand and are being impacted by disruptive technologies such as manufacturing-as-a-service and autonomous distribution and delivery. Supply chains are differentiated by their resilience to abnormal events and disruptions and their ability to accommodate and exploit structural change and disruptive technologies. This unit explores each of these types of disruption and equips students with a variety of strategies for mitigating these risks. Students design resilient supply chains and plan responses to humanitarian crises. They critically assess the structural changes and technological disruption that are taking place in supply chains now or are anticipated to occur in the future. This unit makes extensive use of recent case studies, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

This unit conveys the fundamentals of city logistics, which accommodates the pickup, storage, transport and delivery of freight in urban areas. All aspects from planning, management and operation to security, efficiency and mitigation of environmental impact are covered. The relationships between land use, transport and city logistics are described. Traffic engineering concepts like 'link' and 'place' are outlined and their implications for city logistics are explored. The forms of urban freight consolidation centre are addressed along with the role of alternative transport modes, for example public transport (co-modality), cargo bikes, electric vehicles, droids and drones. This unit explores Ecommerce and fulfilment models, including omni-channel retail and analyses the implications for city logistics of new technologies, apps and the sharing economy. This unit also reviews strategies to improve the sustainability of city logistics and examines reverse logistics, the circular economy and urban farming along with the contribution of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) to urban freight mobility. Cyber and physical threats to city logistics are studied along with mitigation strategies. The lectures conclude with a look into the future for city logistics. Seminars by city logistics professionals complement the lectures. Students have an opportunity to develop city logistics solutions for themselves through a group design project.

Enterprises can access increasing volumes of spatial data (associated with time and space) drawn from a variety of sources including the internet of things, sensors, mobile phone locations and other diverse and unlinked data sets. Managing these data to create useful management insights is a demanding task, and spatial data analysis presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Effective management and analysis of spatial data provides strategic value for organisations, across logistics, transport, marketing and other business functions, allowing enterprises to manage strategic challenges in sustainability and resilience. This unit uses real-world data and problem-based learning to develop hands-on experience with managing, processing and modelling spatial data and ultimately drawing insights for business decisions linked to both distribution and supply chain interactions. Students develop highly marketable skills in spatial data analytics that are transferable across a broad range of industries and sectors. These skills include the ability to generate a range of outputs, including decision support systems, maps and visualisations that effectively communicate complex information to support strategic, tactical and operational decision making. This unit utilises a widely-used spatial software package and introduces Geographic Information Systems (GIS), spatial databases and structured query language (SQL).

Supply chain management, logistics, transport and infrastructure management relies on the ability to make effective decisions supported by careful and appropriate data analysis. Students undertaking this unit develop a strong understanding of the basic techniques underpinning quantitative analysis and develop highly marketable skills in spreadsheet modelling and the communication and presentation of data to support management decision making. This unit emphasises the practical aspects of quantitative analysis with computer-based workshops. Students are guided through the basic theories used in decision making, focusing on how the theories are applied in practice, drawing on real world experience in quantitative analysis. The unit covers basic statistical and data presentation techniques, spreadsheet modelling, linear optimisation methods for production and transportation applications, demand forecasting, simulation, and linear regression techniques.