Li & Fung: Global Supply Chain Manager
From its inception in 1906, more than 100 years, especially since the 1980s, with economic globalization, Li & Fung's business roles, it can be said with the evolution of the global economy, has experienced a historic change from simple middlemen to the global supply chain managers.
After the mid-1990s, Li & Fung has actually become a global supply chain manager. Within the worldwide, he optimizes the supply chain of every order from the European and American customers, thereby creating a most cost-effective supply chain, to provide customers with cost-competitive products and earn maximum marginal profit. Li & Fung ‘s services provided to customers, in addition to product-centric responsible for the work, including market research, product design and development, raw materials procurement, choice of supplier and production monitoring, but also a series of import and export regulatory clearance and logistics arrangements, and financing for potential suppliers of raw materials, factories, wholesale importers and retailers in the supply chain who occupy a key position, so that companies from the supply side and demand side of the supply chain are both able to operate optimally.
From practical experience, Li & Fung summed up the following three aspects: (1) Supply chain includes all kinds of business which starts from the customer needs, from product design through to the supply of raw materials, manufacturing, wholesale, retail and other processes, during which maybe after shipping and warehousing, delivering the product to the final users. (2) Participants in supply chain include corporate and departmental units within the enterprise. The supply chain is the interaction and relationships between these units. And enterprises should pay close collaboration within the enterprise. (3) The supply chain business processes and operations can be analyzed from four