Supply Chain Management

In this section we will discuss the basic beliefs and attitudes that organizations want to promote as well as recognizing that there can be different pressures on owners and managers at different stages of a company’s life as it moves from start up, through growth and maybe to some form of end stage.

Boundaries of the Firm

In section 2 we discussed the strategic choices involved in the Make/Do or Buy/ Trade decision and the answers to this will largely determine to where the boundaries of the firm or business extend. Activities performed by third parties in the supply market are definitely supply chain ones with the opportunities and threats that that implies.

Strategic Role of Purchasing

Purchasing function has a strategically indispensable role to play in supply chain management. It covers the sourcing end of supply chain management interfacing with the delivery end of the suppliers.

The classical definition of purchasing is: to obtain materials and/or services of the right quality in the right quantity from the right source, deliver them to the right place at the right price.

The Need for Agility

Having understood the impact and the indisputable success of the lean philosophy applied in many organizations world over. Can we come to a conclusion that the next milestone, after the craft production and mass production, is going to be the lean production? To answer this question, one needs to first establish whether the lean approach can fit all business environments now and in the future. Researches and literature so far appear to believe the otherwise.

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.