Supply Chain Management
Origins of the Lean Manufacturing
Over the span of circa 40 years time, from the beginning of the 1950s to the end of the 1980s, Toyota led Japanese automotive industry created a unique production/manufacturing system, which brought the industry from the ruins of the 2nd World War to the biggest automobile exporter in the world.
One of the important issues in supply chain management is to design and plan out the overall architecture of the supply chain network and the value-adding flows that go through it. This means that managers should step back and looks at the supply chain as a whole and formulates strategies and processes that maximize the total supply chain value-adding and minimizes the total supply chain costs.
To date, our world market is dominated mostly by many well established global brands. Over the last three decades, there has been a steady trend of global market convergence – the tendency that indigenous markets start to converge on a set of similar products or services across the world. The end-result of the global market convergence is that companies have succeeded in their products or services now have the whole wide world to embrace for their marketing as well as sourcing.
What is supply chain management
What is supply chain management: basically this is a group of independent organizations connected together through the products and services that they separately and/or jointly add value on in order to deliver them to the end consumer. It is very much an extended concept of an organization that adds value to its products or services and delivers them to its customers.
In this section we will discuss the background systems that can be used to fit the supply capability to the customer requirement before going on to discuss the kinds of skills needed by the people employed in this set of activities.