University of Portsmouth, MSc, Logistics and Supply Chain Management

• Supply Chain Management: This unit enable you to develop advanced skills so that you can deal with problems of supply chain management across different products, locations, and companies. The types of problems studied in this course are encountered in industry (e.g. retail, discrete or continuous production and logistics service providers) as well as in service organisations (e.g. banks, hospitals and law firms). Managers dealing with such problems are known under various titles, including production, operations, supply (chain), inventory, purchasing, distribution or logistics managers.
• Logistics Modelling: Most problems arising in the fields of logistics and supply chain management have sufficient complexity and detail that they require the use of sophisticated modelling techniques. This unit looks at two of the most commonly used methodologies for modelling and solving logistics problems: simulation and heuristic techniques. In both cases a computer package is used to assist solution. The techniques will be demonstrated with a range of case studies drawn from the field of logistics including transportation, supply chain configuration and management, warehouse design and layout, container port layout, production planning and vehicle routing.
• Operations Management: This unit teaches operations management techniques that are relevant to logistics. The commonly used techniques of linear and integer programming will be taught using Microsoft Excel based methods for solution. You will look at case studies covering production planning, transportation, logistics planning and supply chain configuration. You will also be taught about locating facilities such as factories, distribution centres, cross docking centres and retail outlets. The effective scheduling of labour force and machines will be demonstrated, and current state-of-the art production planning models will be covered.
• Strategic Logistics: This unit looks at the field of logistics from a strategic point of view. A number of quantitative techniques for strategic decision making such as decision analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis, data envelopment analysis and queuing theory are introduced in the context of logistics applications. The topic of strategic decisions in transportation modelling is then covered. The unit is completed by the analysis of a number of case studies relating to different applications of logistics with respect to financial, environmental, societal and economic objectives.
• Project (Masters Logistics): This unit allows you to conduct research into a larger scale or challenging logistics problem. The project may be practical or theoretical and may arise either from the supervisor's research interests or from your own desire to study a particular topic or situation. Typical areas of logistics in which the project will be conducted include (but are not limited to) transportation, supply chain configuration and management, warehouse design and layout, container port layout, production planning, green logistics, facility location and vehicle routing

Here are some routes our graduates have pursued:

• production management
• transportation management
• quality control
• distribution
• facilities planning
• supply chain management
• passenger transportation