Supply Chain Management

Today more and more essential processes are conducted across enterprise borders, inducing additional challenges in terms of different languages, process types and ontology. Business Process Modelling (BPM) and Simulation are well-understood methods to analyze and optimize the processes within an enterprise. However, they can also be used for cross-organizational application, especially if they are combined with reference structures.

Supply Relationship Defined

Supply relationship can be defined as the cross organisational interaction and exchange between the participating members of the supply chain. This means that the relationship is between organisations not individual people within the same supply chain where the material flows defines the boundary. However for the inter-organisational interaction that falls outside of the main streams of the material flows, then it may not be called collaborative relationship or partnership relation, but may not be the supply relationship.

In section 2 we discussed what could look like very many confusing choices to make in finding suitable customer opportunities and framing an effective value proposition to provide the opportunity for customer satisfaction. We need to find a way to simplify these choices and in this section we do this by the use of the concepts of order qualifiers and order winners.

What’s the future holds for supply chain management? The future of supply chain management is the future of business management when there will be no business that is not part of a supply chain. The paradigm of business management will soon be converged to the paradigm of supply chain management. To precisely fortune-tell the future of supply chains is meaningless.

But what’s useful is to identify and explore some challenges that we better prepare ourselves for. Three key challenges have been identified and discussed here.

This section considers what it is that is needed to successfully deliver customer satisfaction recognizing that many market places and customer groups have their own special challenges. This means again that there is no one solution to all of these and so more evaluation and managerial choice is necessary and this needs to be done regularly.