Importance of Supply Chain Management

As shown in Section 1.6, supply chain management can have a significant impact on business performance. Based on a 2003 Accenture study, done in conjunction with Stanford University, Mulani (2005) reported the following  

Moreover, failure to excel in supply chain management can negatively affect a company s stock price. Hendricks and Singhal (2005) found this to be true in a study of 885 supply chain disruptions reported by publicly traded companies during 1989-2000. The list of companies included small, medium, and large companies with respect to market capitalization and covered both manufacturing and IT industries. Hendricks and Singhal 

Supply chain management has become sufficiently important to business performance to warrant a mantra, of sorts, namely that companies do not compete with each other, but their supply chains do. While some might debate whether entire supply chains could literally compete with each other, there is no doubt that efficient management of the supply chain has become a competitive differentiator for many companies. In the next section, we discuss the top 25 supply chains and what supply chain characteristics make them industry leaders. 

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Nonetheless, the goal of AMR s rankings of the Supply Chain Top 25 is to raise the importance of supply chain management and its potential to positively impact companies profitability. By identifying the leaders and their best practices, the hope is that other companies can learn from them and improve their supply chain performance. 

In this chapter, we have defined the term "supply chain engineering" and discussed the types of decisions that are made in managing supply chains. We also demonstrated the close relationship between certain supply chain performance metrics and a company s financial performance. Finally, the importance of supply chain management was illustrated in our discussion of the Supply Chain Top 25 (Hofman et al., 2011) and their essential characteristics. An overview of the topics covered in Chapters 2 through 8 was also presented. 

The examples above indicate that organizations have benefited remarkably from supply chain management, which reflects the importance of supply chain management in practice. However, there are many uncertainties that affect the effectiveness of supply chain and will be analyzed as follows. 

Management consulting firms, including many of the top tier firms, recognize the importance of supply chain management. Evidence of... 

As mentioned earlier, GIS has found application in areas important to supply chain management. These include logistics network design, routing, and mode selection. The idea in all these apphcations is to integrate the GIS with mathematical models and algorithms. Figure 6 provides a schematic representation of such a system. 

Partnerships with key suppliers and customers are an important part of supply chain management. 

Up-to-date information technology is a very important aspect of supply chain management today. We will look at several different types of software packages that are available. 

This chapter focused on coordination as an important component of supply chain management. We presented three cases focused on coordination decisions to develop a problem context. We then discussed several supply... 

When we submitted the abstract of this book to many publishers, to celebrate this 30-year journey of supply chain management, we were told that it was "boring." Publisher after publisher turned us down. However, we persevered. We think it is an important story, ft is the progression of the manufacturing age of business, the underpinning of the middle-class economy, and the essential component of many new business models. 

Before defining the DDSC concept, it is very important to review the concept of Supply Chain Management, as it will serve as the foundation to build the DDSC concept. To that end, the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP 2009) defines Supply Chain Management as follow ... 

This chapter provides an overview of basic management practices. It then quickly reviews the basics of manufacturing strategy. It is important that supply chain managers understand how their decisions are shaped by and help to shape their firm s manufacturing strategy. 

The statistics for quality have been around for a long time. Common performance measures include Pp, Pp, Cp, Cp first-time capability (FTC), line speed, and defective parts per million (ppm). This section provides an overview of common process capability terms and addresses their importance in supply chain management. 

Based on a survey of supply chain managers, Marien (2000) describes four enablers of effective management of the supply chain. In order of their ranked importance by the survey respondents, they are organizational infrastructure, information technology, strategic alliances, and human resource management. 

This chapter presents important problems in supply chain risk management that extend beyond the traditional treatment of supply chain management commonly found in textbooks. We discuss in detail the vulnerability, driven by globalization, of supply chains around the world to a disruptive event in one part of a single country. This chapter presents models and methods to answer the following queshons ... 

From this point of view, one of the most important tasks of supply chain management is to minimize, sometimes to avoid adverse effects caused by uncertainty in a supply chain to ensure the regularity of material flow, enhance flexibility as well as certainty, and reduce costs. To achieve those goals, optimizing the supply chain program plays a profound role in supply chain management. 

Regardless of how proficiency criteria are determined, all the above models present the road to excellence understood as the fulfilment of supply chain management principles. The levels of excellence most frequently pertain to selected supply chain processes or resources. Less often, they relate to conditions that should come with improvements. Issues related to the circumstances (background) of process and resources excellence are very important, as the low effectiveness and unsatisfactory efficiency of measures imdertaken in this area is often caused by ignorance on the part of the entities initiating and implementing SCM principles. 

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