08-27-2026
When it comes to supply chains, judgment begins with traditional textbook models. Yet, as the Daniels School's Amy David and Qi Feng discovered over more than a decade of teaching advanced courses, sound judgment for today's global supply chain challenges requires more.
“To tell you the truth, we saw this as a gap,” David explains, and it prompted them to create course materials that are now compiled in their new book, Architecting Global Supply Chains. “In your first couple of classes, you’re going to learn all the models. And then in your more advanced classes, you’re going to learn why all the models are wrong.”
Architecting Global Supply Chains is written for that upper-level moment — when students already know the core frameworks and now must confront the messy reality of global volatility. Rather than attempting “encyclopedic coverage,” the book narrows in on the high‑impact forces that define modern complexity: interest rate shifts, foreign exchange exposure, tariffs and trade barriers, technology diffusion, and the distinctive economics of not‑for‑profit and mission‑driven networks. These are precisely the forces that are the thorny trade‑offs requiring deeply honed judgment where every design decision has financial, political and strategic consequences.
One aspect of the text is its emphasis on “cash view” of supply chains and the introduction of the cash gradient metric, which reframes resilience as a question of how quickly operations convert cash into more cash across the network. David notes that many supply chain practitioners still treat cash‑to‑cash cycle time as a finance metric, even though its drivers — supplier terms, customer terms, inventory velocity — are fundamentally operational. By putting cash, material and information flows on equal footing, the book equips readers to see where liquidity risk actually resides, especially in environments where working capital is as critical as physical inventory.
The authors also introduce a vital perspective missing from standard texts: the decisive role of the broader institutional environment. They show that institutional constraints, trade policies, and political forces often override standard profit-optimization and cost-efficiency paradigms in shaping network strategies. As contemporary supply chains face rising geopolitical volatility, climate risks, and rapid technological shifts, capturing these institutional dynamics in motion becomes far more important than relying on static risk estimations.
To this end, the book offers new conceptual frameworks to analyze, understand, and strategically map these evolving challenges. For instance, it demonstrates that supply chain risks are best viewed along dynamic trajectories, arguing that long-term strategies should focus on transforming evolving risks into manageable, evaluable forms rather than merely scoring their likelihood and impact.
The book’s chapter architecture mirrors the interconnectedness students will face in practice: material flow, cash exposure, information and technology, global expansion versus localization, total cost of ownership, supplier cost modeling, foreign exchange, tariffs, nonprofit supply chains, and risk management. David describes the challenge of even deciding chapter order as evidence of how entangled these themes are in real networks. Rather than providing step‑by‑step procedures tied to specific technologies, the authors develop structural frameworks that expose leverage points, fragility, and trade‑offs so students learn how to reason, not just how to follow a recipe.
For business students and practitioners ready to move beyond “plug‑and‑chug” optimization, Architecting Global Supply Chains serves as a guide for those wrestling with questions such as: When does accepting a tariff risk beat redesigning a product? How should FX exposure and access to capital in different regions shape supplier choices? Where is resilience worth its cost premium — and where is fragility a calculated bet? As David puts it, “What companies need isn’t really technology. What they need is information. Humans make decisions, but humans need information.”
That focus on human decision‑making is the point. In a world enamored with AI, Architecting Global Supply Chains insists that algorithms can process data, but they cannot anticipate the next pandemic, the next policy shock, or the next geopolitical rupture on their own.
“Human judgment is always going to be an important factor in our supply chain,” David emphasizes. “AI can manage transactions and such, but building around a strategy and a risk management plan takes human judgment.”
