This course covers the following topics in four weeks. In Week 1, you will learn competitive analysis and bench-marking to assess a firm's competitive environment and identify the key business opportunities. In Week 2, you will learn the general principles and the driving forces in supply chain planning, and developed insights and intuitions on the advantages and disadvantages of the push/pull strategies, which will guide you in the supply chain analytics to be conducted in Week 3. In Week 3, you will learn what data to collect, how to estimate various types of costs, and how to use data analysis to assess the net impact of various strategies on a supply chain. In Week 4, you will learn how to evaluate soft but important issues such as customer service and the implementation of a supply chain transformation in a large-scale system. You will complete this course by doing a project to help VASTA discover geographic differences for these strategies. The course is designed in such a way that over these weeks, you'll learn the entire supply chain improvement process from opportunity identification, to intuition and insights development, to data analytics, and finally to implementation. The time commitment is about 2.5 hours a week, and we will use Excel as the software. Specifically, in Week 1, the competitive analysis and bench-marking will help you understand the competitive landscape, which means what metrics are you competing on, and your strengths and weakness in comparison to your competitors. In Week 2, you will learn a general principles and drivers of supply chain planning. We will answer questions such as, what is the trade-off between shipping and inventory? How does it affect supply chain planning? You will also develop intuition on how push/pull strategies may affect various parts of the supply chain, and how the effectiveness of these strategies maybe product dependent. In Week 3, we will get into the hard core of data analytics by first learning what data to collect, for instance, the sales and inventory data, and how to estimate the cost for shipping, inventory and warehouse order fulfillment, and so on. Then we apply analytics to VASTA's supply chain to assess, quantitatively, the net impact of the push/pull strategies by product. For example, fast versus slow moving products, expensive versus inexpensive products. The quantitative analysis will confirm, enrich, and expand the intuition developed in Week 2, and provides precise and actionable suggestions. Although we may save a lot on cost, we shall never sacrifice on customer service. So in Week 4, you'll learn how the store and showroom models may affect customer experience either positively or negatively. You'll also evaluate various shipping options to enhance customer convenience. The implementation of such a large-scale system-wide transition is challenging. It was actually done within one year in practice. So you'll learn the implementation process step by step, and the actual financial outcome. To complete this course, you will get a chance to work on a real life project. Using the techniques that you learned in this course, you can help VASTA to find out the geographic differences of the strategies between New York City and Los Angeles. This instructory course on supply chain analytics is designed for three general audiences. Those of you who are exploring a career in supply chain management and analytics, and those of you who are fascinated by the potential of analytics and like to learn its applications in supply chain management, and those of you who work with people in supply chain management or supply chain analytics and like to understand their disciplines better. This course is designed for beginners with no prior experiences. It would be helpful however, if you have some knowledge or experiences in the following areas such as, general business acumen, Supply Chain Analytics Assentials at Coursera, and Supply Chain Logistics at Coursera.