Current market and business environment

Velocity-based competition, less consumer loyalty, shortened product lifecycles, increased demand variability, globalization and global sourcing, leaner supply chains, more mass customization, and competitive pressures have altered the supply chain management requirements in fundamental ways, forcing organizations to rethink how they operate or risk being left behind. 

However, in today s fiercely competitive enviroiunent, it is not enough simply to streamline global supply chains and eliminate excess costs. Leading companies are applying new technologies and sophisticated analytics to make their supply chains more responsive to customer demand, rather than letting availability of supply drive the chain. 

While planning remains a core part of any business, the faster pace of change not only in demand, but also supply and product, multiplies the problems that planning cannot always prevent. The financial impact to a company unable to respond to change can be crippling. Poor response can affect both the top line (e.g., inabihty to win new business, loss of customers to competitors, etc.), and bottom line (e.g., negative impact on margins, write-offs of excess and obsolete inventories, etc.). 

At the end of 2007, and for the third year in a row in 2009, the 25 companies identified by Boston-based AMR Research (2009) as maintaining the top supply chains among the Fortune 500 enjoyed market-beating stock performance, with an average total return of 17.9% compared with 6.4% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. 

Over the past years, to effectively manage the volatility in demand, companies across a wide range of industries (e.g., automobile, fashion, etc.) have adopted demand-driven supply networks, using the pull of actual customer demand, rather than the push of available supply, to manage their network of suppliers, materials and components from manufacturing to distribution to improve supply chain efficiency while simultaneously meeting customer service requirements. 

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This chapter describes the goals, main contributions and areas covered by the book, and also reviews the current market and business environment which demands for a demand driven focus in order to reduce product out-of-stock levels and increase supply chain efficiency. 

In this book, it is reviewed the current market and business environment and highlighted the importance of companies become demand driven instead of production driven based on the contingency approach. In a demand driven supply chain, customers activate the replenishment flow and the organization is structured and prepared to sense and respond to real time demand across the supply chain, which should include customers and suppliers. 

This is the opportunity-oriented perspective on environmental issues. It can be used and applied in any business context. Yet many companies remain focused on compliance and regulatory issues as their definition of environment. Those entrepreneurial thinkers within corporations who perceive market opportunities for more environmentally responsible products face significant obstacles if senior level managers are ill-informed about current market conditions and societal trends. Companies unable to adapt take the risk of falling by the wayside as their competitors move quickly to pursue new markets for environmentally benign materials and technology. 

The goal of this section was to outline current differences between the implementation of process analytics in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry, specifically in the areas of business model, technology and regulations. The reader of this chapter should be aware that this status quo is changing rapidly in the pharmaceutical industry due to a changing business cUmate, combined with a more technology-aware regulatory environment in the major pharmaceutical markets. The authors of this chapter would expect that future editions of this book would see major revisions to this comparison of the industries. 

BASF is thus currently endeavouring to establish the substance DINCH as a new registered substitute (entirely tested plasticiser without any hazardous properties) for DEHP in high-price market segments (e.g. medical devices). Soft PVC users substitute on the material level, if they can achieve further process-related and/or quahty-related optimisations in the course of technological development (e.g. underbody hard shells) Environment and health-compatible substance properties are additional qualities in business-to-business (B2B) markets. They are of relevance almost only for manufacturers, who market their products on demand-dominated, saturated markets with differentiated quality production — Hypothesis 8). 

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