Sustainable Supply Chain Management

TH Köln · winter term 2026/27

This online script is your guide through the readings, tests and exercises that we will do in this course.

The module at a glance: profit and environmental impact in balance, productivity as the core ratio, seven weekly topics, tests and grading. Image generated with Gemini.

What you will learn

• Analyse processes — productivity, capacity, bottlenecks, quality
• Analyse environmental effects across the supply chain — CO₂, energy, materials, from product to network
• Build models for decision support — small calculation models in Google Colab
• Simulate and visualise — simulations, animations, dashboards
• Use AI — to learn, to analyse processes, to check results

Topics: productivity · process strategy and capacity · design for sustainability · quality · forecasting · supply chains · sales and operations planning

The title in two pictures

Supply chain — the firms and steps from raw material to customer. Materials move forward, orders and information move back.

A beer supply chain. Materials move forward (red), orders and information move backward (magenta). Own illustration.

Sustainable — profit drives a firm, but it also causes effects it does not pay for (external effects, Latin externus, “outward”). In this module: the environmental effects — CO₂, energy, materials, waste — beside profit. A definition is a tool, like a flashlight: it lights one part of the room sharply.

The firm, driven by profit, and its external effects. The module’s definition puts the flashlight on the environmental ones. Own illustration.

Where to go next

• Syllabus — weekly rhythm, dates, reading, grading
• Week by week — one card per Thursday
• Tools — Google Colab in five minutes
• Week 1 — Thursday, 1 October