In today’s rapidly changing business environment, ever-greater demands are being placed on business on every industry, such as to provide products and services quicker, with greater added value, to the correct location, with no relevant inventory position, etc. However, customers are more sophisticated by wanting more quality, design, innovation, choice, convenience and service, and they want to spend less money, effort, time and risk. Hence, every business has to deal with highly competitive situation in order to survive; Supply Chain Management (SCM) becoming the main topic for improving efficiency and satisfy customer’s need.
The supply chain of a company consists of different departments, ranging from procurement of materials to customer service. Supply chain management means transforming a company’s “supply chain” into an optimally efficient, customer-satisfying process, where the effectively of the whole supply chain is more important than the effectiveness of each individual department. Cost involved in the Supply Chain operation and process can be significant influencing the satisfaction of customers and the whole chain efficiency. The following assignment I will be focus on the total cost concept in operating supply chains of my selected firm.
Introduction
Every business organization needs to delivers products to its customers. Traditionally we would have described these products as either goods or services. Then manufacturers like Sony makes electronic products or Toyota makes cars these kinds of tangible goods, while the Vodafone makes mobile or Internet service provide the intangible services. In reality, this view is rather uncertainly, some products are really a complex package that contains both goods and services. The organization that I have chosen is one of the largest computer manufacture and IT consulting company that contains both goods and services. The IBM Company.
IBM is one of the world large computers and IT