Retail Services Engineering

Catalog description

Objective of this course is to understand modern retail industry with focus on their operations and information technologies. The course starts with an overview of the basic types of retailing, their channels, and economics of their operations. This will be followed by an introduction to financial statements and understanding how they are used for measuring performance of retailers. Warehousing and distributions operations will be reviewed. Queuing models will be introduced and applied for staffing checkout processes and distribution centers. Mean value analysis from queuing theory will be used for rough-cut capacity planning of automated cross-docks which are now being increasingly used in retailing. Information technologies and data analytics in retail industry will be covered through exercises in class using MS Access and MS Excel VBA to give students hands-on learning experience with these techniques. Data warehouse architectures will also be discussed.