Preview

Importance of Supply Chain Management in Modern Businesses Essay Example

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
888 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Importance of Supply Chain Management in Modern Businesses Essay Example
Importance of Supply Chain Management in Modern Businesses
By Razamith Sovereign

Supply Chain Management (SCM) as defined by Tom McGuffog is "Maximising added value and reducing total cost across the entire trading process through focusing on speed and certainty of response to the market." Due to globalization and ICT, SCM has become a tool for companies to compete effectively either at a local level or at a global scale. SCM has become a necessity especially for manufacturing industry when it comes to deliver products at a competitive cost and at a higher quality than their competitors. Here are some of the reason SCM has become important to today's manufacturing industry:-
Competitive Edge through Core Competencies
Today's business climate has rapidly changed and has become more competitive as ever in nature. Businesses now not only need to operate at a lower cost to compete, it must also develop its own core competencies to distinguish itself from competitors and stand out in the market. In creating the competitive edge, companies need to divert its resources to focus on what they do best and outsource the process and task that is not important to the overall objective of the company. SCM has allowed company to rethink their entire operation and restructure it so that they can focus on its core competencies and outsource processes that are not within the core competencies of the company. Due to the current competitive market, it is the only way for a company to survive. The strategy on applying SCM will not only impact their market positioning but also strategic decision on choosing the right partners, resources and manpower. By focusing on core competencies also will allow the company to create niches and specialization of core areas. As stated in the Blue Ocean Strategy outlined by Chan Kim, in order to create a niche for competitive advantage, companies must look at the big picture of the whole process, and figuring out which process can be reduce,

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Supply Chain Management (SCM): Supply chain management is the active management of supply chain activities to maximise customer value and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. It represents a conscious effort by the supply chain firms to develop and run supply chains in the most effective & efficient ways possible. Supply chain activities cover everything from product development, sourcing, production, and logistics, as well as the information systems needed to coordinate these activities.…

    • 954 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    MKT 411 Final Exam Review

    • 5846 Words
    • 24 Pages

    Supply Chain Management – the art of managing the flow of materials, products and information from source to end-user. Managing relationships to deliver superior value at less cost…

    • 5846 Words
    • 24 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    white powder analysis

    • 602 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The cation(s) present in the unknown sample are silver and iron. I know this because the precipitates and the colors of the elements precipitates matched therefore making the unknowns identifiable.…

    • 602 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Res 320

    • 926 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In today’s global market that is changing rapidly companies need to keep up with demand and market strategies to stay competitive. Businesses need to develop a process that allows them to operate at lower costs, and develop its own identity to distinguish it from other competitors. Supply Chain Management (SCM) has become an intricate part of the company operations allowing them to rethink how to reorganize their operation so they can focus on the core competencies of the company. SCM focus is to improve the way a company uses its resources such as raw materials and how it is delivered to its customers. Any product offered by a company, there are normally a number of business partners involved in the supply chain, including the manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and retailers and the most important partner in this…

    • 926 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The term supply chain management was named by Keith Oliver in 1992, economists called this the creation era. In the so-called integration era, SCM got developed along with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems with the internet-based collaborative systems. SCM is starting to get widely used in the globalization era in the late 1980s. In the 1990s companies began to outsource manufacturing and distribution. This new step created need for manufacturing and distribution networks with many supply chains. (Haag, Cummings, McCubbrey, Pinsonneault, Donovan 2006)…

    • 928 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Operations Management

    • 2215 Words
    • 9 Pages

    Supply chain management is the coordination of the processes and functions within a business, adopted by most companies in the UK in the late 1990’s. It deals with the internal and external factors that, when dealt with correctly and systematically, can determine a businesses success or failure. A supply chain is the network of activities that delivers a finished product service to the customer. By definition, supply chain management (SCM) is “the management of the flows of materials from suppliers to customers in order to reduce overall cost and increase responsiveness to the customers” (Reid & Sanders). SCM entails the co-ordination of the movement of good through the supply chain from suppliers to manufacturers to distributors to the final customer. The main aim of SCM is to maximise the efficiency of any given process being carried out by a company; by doing this it is allowing them to try to cut their costs and hopefully keep satisfying their customers’ needs, while at the same time maintaining their competitive position within their market. Supply chain management is seen as more of an “open system” in contrast to the traditional system used by the majority of companies just 20 years ago. The new “open system” allows room for change which is greatly needed with the current financial instability of the economy.…

    • 2215 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    My sister's friend Cody Spiker called and said, "You're having a bonfire and didn't invite me?" Little did we know, our shop was on fire.…

    • 859 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Walmart's supply chain

    • 515 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Supply Chain Management (SCM) includes all the activities that must take place to get the right product into the consumer’s hands in the right quantity and at the right time – from raw materials extraction to consumer purchase.…

    • 515 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Best Essays

    One of the fundamental questions facing modern organisations is how to achieve and sustain competitive advantage (Rumelt et al 1994) within an increasingly fast moving environment. Supply Chain Management (SCM) is critical element of model business strategy and globalisation trends where Organisations can create significant competitive advantage. SCM has many definitions but is essence is ‘the management of upstream and downstream relationships with suppliers and customers to deliver superior customer value at less cost to the supply chain as a whole’ (Christopher, 2005). Therefore the knowledge and understanding of the various processes involved in SCM are critical in the efficient controlling the supply chain (Davis, 2010). The purchasing process within SCM has thus become a central part with a role “to purchase the RIGHT QUALITY of material, at the RIGHT TIME, in the RIGHT QUANTITY, from the RIGHT SOURCE, at the RIGHT PRICE” (Baily, Farmer, Jessop and Jones, 2005)…

    • 3415 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Supply chain management (SCM) is the process that is used by a company to ensure that its supply chain is efficient and cost effective. They are aiming at provide the highest degree of customer satisfaction at the lowest possible cost through management of material and information flow in the supply chain .It requires the commitment of supply chain partners to work closely to coordinate order generation, order taking, and order fulfillment.…

    • 2892 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Much uncertainty about what supply chain management entails is present in today’s society. Many people treat supply chain management as being synonymous with logistics, which is the management of the flow of goods from the origin to the consumers. However, supply chain management encompasses much more than the purchasing or management of goods to the consumer. Supply chain management is the combination of art and science that goes into improving the way your company finds the raw components it needs to make a product or service and deliver it to customers. The following are five basic components of SCM.[2]…

    • 744 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Supply chain management (SCM) is very important and effective to all companies. David Simchi-Levi, Philip Kaminsky, and Edith Simchi-Levi defines supply chain management as “a set of approaches utilized to efficiently integrate suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, and stores, so that merchandise is produced and distributed at the right quantities, to the right locations, and at the right time, in order to minimize systemwide costs while satisfying service level requirements.” Supply chain management, also called logistics network, includes suppliers, industrialized centers, warehouses, distributions centers, and retail outlets, as well as unprocessed materials, work-in-progress stock, and finished goods that run linking the facilities. SCM is all about having the right product in the right place, at the right price, at the right time and in the right condition. A good way to explain supply chain management is to use a worldwide known restaurant for an example, because depending on where the location of the restaurant is tells you where the inventory comes from. It is essential for restaurants to have enough inventory to cover the customer demand no matter what. For this, supply chain management is extremely crucial and can make or break a business. Charles Dominick explains, “the three types of entities of a supply chain: customers, a producer, and the producer's suppliers. The extended supply chain includes customers’ customers and suppliers’ suppliers. SCM oversees and optimizes the processes of acquiring inputs from suppliers (purchasing), converting those inputs into a finished product (production), and delivering those products – or outputs - to customers (fulfillment).” From all the types of entities listed before, it falls on the supply chain manager’s job to choose where to find manufacturing and delivery services, how to send the goods and materials to those services, and from which parts of the world to…

    • 963 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Supply chain management has been defined as the "design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand and measuring performance globally. SCM is a cross-functional approach that includes managing the movement of raw materials into an organization, certain aspects of the internal processing of materials into finished goods, and the movement of finished goods out of the organization and toward the end consumer. As organizations strive to focus on core competencies and becoming more flexible, they reduce their ownership of raw materials sources and distribution channels. These functions are increasingly being outsourced to other firms that can perform the activities better or more cost effectively. The effect is to increase the number of organizations involved in satisfying customer demand, while reducing managerial control of daily logistics operations. Less control and more supply chain partners led to the creation of the concept of supply chain management. The purpose of supply chain management is…

    • 5240 Words
    • 18 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    While there is plenty of published literature that explains or espouses SCM, there is a dearth of empirical studies examining logistics and SCM practices. Galt and Dale (1991) study ten organizations in the UK and find that they are working to reduce their supplier base and to improve their communications with the suppliers. Fernie (1995) carries out an international comparison of SCM in the grocery retailing industry. He finds significant differences in inventory held in the supply chain by the US and European grocery retailers, which could be explained by difference in degrees of their SCM adoption. Tan and Wisner (2000) compare SCM in the US and Europe. Tan (2002) relates SCM practices and concerns to firm’s performance based on data from US companies. He lists nine important supply chain concerns such as lack of sophisticated ICT infra-structure, insufficient integration due to lack of trust and collaboration among the supply chain stakeholders and thereby lack of supply chain effectiveness and efficiencies. Basnet et al. (2003) report the current status of SCM in New Zealand, while Sahay et al. (2003) discuss supply chain strategies and structures in India. These surveys rank the perceived importance of some SCM activities, types of hindrances and management tools on the success of SCM using representative samples mostly from manufacturing. Quayle (2003) surveys supply chain management practice in UK industrial SMEs (Small Manufacturing Enterprises) while Kemppainen and Vepsalainen (2003) probe…

    • 392 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Marks and Spencer is a retailer of clothing, housewares, and food items with a long history of great value and excellent customer service. M&S is not only perceived as a great brand, but is also revered with admiration in its country of origin the United Kingdom. It is in the business of providing high quality “essential” merchandise at moderate price, and high quality pre-cooked food at high rates. The company strategy is strong and evident in all their functions. Moreover, its value addition to the buyer is extremely high, which naturally builds Marks and Spencer’s brand equity. Marks and Spencer is a very successful retailer for many reasons, but the core of their strategy relies on their employees, their supply chain management, and their rooted understanding of customer’s needs.…

    • 1232 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays