Field trip - follow a supply chain

I stumbled upon this story from the University of Texas' McCombs School of Business, describing a class that took a field trip to a Target store, distribution center, the Port of Long Beach and then to a couple factories in China.  All to get a better feel for the workings of a supply chain.  Toy Story: Supply Chain Traces Products from Factory to Store Shelves.

Students in Michael Hasler’s introductory operations management class spent five weeks last summer tracking three products–a doll, lawn furniture and a calculator–upstream through the supply chain, starting at an Austin Target store and ending up in a factory in Shenzhen, China.

The course covered a variety of topics, including Theory of Constraints, which is how I came across it in the first place.  Sounds like fun.

[Photo: slide from the original article - see the full image there]