Supply chain is fun! Look at these goodies!

Most “introductions” start with forecasts, targets, and plans. This one starts with reality: supply chain is the business of making profitable choices when the future won’t sit still. Joannes Vermorel reframes the field as applied economics—mastering options under variability—and shows how to turn that stance into everyday practice.

From purchasing to last mile, the author explains why single number forecasts and ritual meetings quietly misallocate capital, then offers a practical alternative: price trade offs in money, carry uncertainty explicitly, and let simple, auditable software place many small bets faster than committees can meet. When the system can’t trust itself, it stops—so people can fix the economics and resume with confidence.

Rooted in seventeen years of hands on work across diverse industries, this is both a rethink and a field manual. It keeps what works, discards what doesn’t, and gives operators, students, and professors a common language for decisions—not dogma.

You’ll learn how to:

• See your flow as a portfolio of options and grow flexibility without bloat.
• Replace point forecasts with probabilities that acknowledge spikes, delays, and rare events.
• Rank allocations by expected return and risk so local KPIs can’t hide global waste.
• Design auditable decision software that writes back safely to your systems.
• Escape spreadsheet traps through small, reversible experiments that compound week after week.