Welcome to Process Management: Creating Value along the Supply Chain, Text & Cases. The past 25 years has been characterized by tremendous change in the areas of purchasing, transportation, production, information systems, and supply chain management. These changes have created significant changes in the processes used for product design, manufacturing, and distribution, and in the way companies manage their relationships with suppliers and customers. Companies have evolved from being strictly internally focused with adversarial supplier relationships and only a passive regard for customers, to what we commonly see today-significant efforts placed identifying customers and end-product users with the goal of continually satisfying their needs, and building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with suppliers and customers in order to collaborate to better serve customers. When process collaboration or integration is performed correctly, supply chains become formidable competitive entities, customers get what they want and continue to return, and all of the companies along the supply chain benefit. The objective of this textbook is to encourage readers to think about the key processes companies use to purchase, make, and deliver products and services success-fully, and how these processes are integrated within a supply chain framework. This textbook would be most useful for a Process Management class in an undergraduate supply chain management curriculum, as an upper-level Operations Management class or elective, as an MBA class in Process or Operations Management, or as a business-oriented course in Industrial Engineering. Most supply chain management degree programs have a course entitled Process Management, and this text is specifically suited for this class. This text is designed around the eight key value-creating supply chain processes listed in Chapter 1. Managers, too, will find this textbook extremely useful in creating strategies for improving their firms? competitive positions. Some of the unique things included in this text are: 21 easy-to-difficult cases spread throughout the sections and provided on the student and instructor CD-ROMs, three chapters addressing the concepts of flow management, a chapter on lean thinking, a chapter on returns management, and a chapter on future trends in process management. We think these and the other chapters will be a valuable source of information for business and engineering students and practicing business managers.