SUPPLY CHAIN, LOGISTICS, AND INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

A supply chain is not simply the movement of purchased goods between independent firms. It is a governed network of physical, informational and financial commitments whose performance emerges from coordination across organizational and territorial boundaries. This chapter critically develops supply chain, logistics and inventory management through twelve interdependent domains, encompassing network design, demand amplification, inventory economics, warehousing, transport, trade facilitation, resilience, relational integration, information systems, performance measurement, circular logistics and emerging technologies. A targeted, transparent synthesis connects foundational operations research and interorganizational theory with peer-reviewed resilience and sustainability scholarship, professional standards and dated Rwandan institutional evidence. Rwanda’s 2024 Integrated Business Enterprise Survey and 2025 Northern Corridor measurements contextualize the distinctive conditions of small enterprises and landlocked regional trade, without implying firm-level causal effects. A fully hypothetical Kigali distribution case demonstrates economic order quantity, safety stock, reorder points, expected shortages, cash exposure and a quantified border-disruption response. An end-to-end network model, decision matrices, a metric dictionary and an accompanying formula-based inventory workbook make the analysis inspectable. The argument is that supply chain effectiveness cannot be inferred from lowest freight cost, high asset utilization or minimum inventory alone: it requires conditional alignment among service reliability, total cost, liquidity, adaptability, informational credibility and legitimate stakeholder interests. The proposed integration is a pedagogical and analytical synthesis, not an empirically validated causal model.