Supply chain describing

Table 4.1 compares the characteristics of a Demand Driven Supply Chain described in the literature review presented in Chap. 2 with the Supply Chain Processes described by Lambert (2008) in Sect. 4.1, and it can be seen that the supply chain processes represent a possible way to categorize the DDSC components. 

Figure 19.2 illustrates horizontal and vertical partnerships. Vertical partnerships reflect the trend toward consolidation in many supply chains to reduce the complications that go with too many participants and to make the supply chain faster in its response to changes. The evolving model of the supply chain described in Chapter 18 forecasts more growth of partnerships in the vertical direction. In these cases, fewer players perform more supply chain functions, capturing a greater share of supply chain value. 

How do you distinguish between a lean supply chain and an agile supply chain Describe the characteristics of both a lean supply chain and an agile supply chain. 

You and your innovative employees finally have the chance to practice not only the common value analysis of products, but also of your performance processes. Single-item producers add processes such as design, work sheet preparation, etc. to the supply chains. The supply chains describe every performance to be rendered as individual steps. You can view them as plotted images. This total transparency is the basis of the process value analysis. 

You plan and control your performance and supplier network, i.e. your supply chain partnership, similar to the intra-corporate supply chain described in Chapter III. Your objective will be met ... 

The Wassermann Supply Chains described earlier in this book (Fig. 10) are ideally suited for the structuring and visualization of global supply chains. There is no need to change paradigms. 

You may be surprised at the question that now appears at the end of this book. Are not the supply chains described in this book efficient Sure they are, but innovation goes on ... 

Two distinct and simple business strategies for manufacturing household furniture may be described as the provision of either low-cost, short lifespan, or expensive, long lifespan products. The decision on which strategy to take is made at the conception stage of the business and may depend upon existing supply chain links, market opportunities or available workforce skill set for example. It is unlikely that such a strategic decision would ever be made... 

The text summarises the activities and outcome of the Organic HACCP project (www.organichaccp.org) that was completed in 2005, how a database of critical control points (CCPs) was developed for some representative supply chains and how this was used to define a set of recommendations that were then developed into leaflets with advice to producers, processors, retailers or consumers, respectively. The chapter will thus explain how companies at every step of the production chain can utilise the concepts to improve customer satisfaction in a cost-effective manner. Finally, it will describe an example of implementation in a group of collaborating companies and suggest where additional activities are needed in order to develop the concept further. 

The project group designed a questionnaire with 286 questions, structured to cover each substep of all the types of major steps encountered in the supply chains. If an enterprise covered more than one major step, this meant that more than one interview was carried out, with more than one person or more interviews with the same person. For each enterprise, the interviewees typically answered 150-200 questions about 1-3 major steps. The questions were designed by experts to describe the principles and intentions of the... 

To tackle these problems successfully, new concepts will be required for developing systematic modeling techniques that can describe parts of the chemical supply chain at different levels of abstraction. A specific example is the integration of molecular thermodynamics in process simulation computations. This would fulfill the objective of predicting the properties of new chemical products when designing a new manufacturing plant. However, such computations remain unachievable at the present time and probably will remain so for the next decade. The challenge is how to abstract the details and description of a complex system into a reduced dimensional space. 

Before starting an improvement process, a clear picture of the supply chain has to be obtained. Therefore, Supply Chain Analysis is a critical success factor. Usually, this analysis will describe the as-is status and the desired to-be status. As a supply chain is built up of different companies for a limited time, it is essential that all partners speak the same language to describe and measure the as-is-status as well as to evaluate the to-be-status. For this purpose, usually a widely accepted model called the SCOR-model is used. 

In 1958, Forrester started studies on an effect which is nowadays often referred to as the bullwhip effect. The bullwhip effect describes the amplification of temporal variations of the orders in a supply chain the more one moves away from the retail customer. Forrester showed that small changes in consumer demand result in large variations of orders placed upstream [4, 5]. It is interesting that this effect occurs even if the demand of final products is almost stable. For his studies, he assumed that some time delay exists between placing an order and the realization of this order (production). Furthermore, he assumed that each part of the supply chain plans its production and places its orders upstream taking into account only the information about the demands of its direct customer. 

At the process level, the flow of material and the flow of information are linked together by describing the transformation of information and material. Hence, it reflects the workflow of a supply chain. 

The SCOR-model is used to describe, measure and evaluate the configuration of a supply chain. It supports ... 

The figures mentioned in this section are sufficient to describe the as-is state of the supply chain. Establishing and discussing these figures lead to first ideas of potential enhancements of the supply chain regarding the structure of the supply chain and the process flow. 

As sketched out initially, simulation can be used at different points in time of a production system lifecycle and with a different scope (see Figure 2.1). Considering the lifecycle and the scope, the three case studies described in this section may be classified differently, from supply chain to plant level and from planning to daily operation. 

At present, the trend is moving from the analysis of individual production and logistics systems towards the optimization of entire production networks, that is, the optimization of the distribution to different production locations taking account of the procurement and distribution chain as indicated by the remarks on supply chain simulation earlier in this chapter. However, in particular for these applications there are some challenges in the basic work of providing consistent and coherent data describing the processes at different sites which most likely are located in different countries. 

Such a supply chain network easily adds up to tens of thousands of nodes and edges with which the product relations are described, whereby a node can represent raw material, an intermediary product or a final product. An edge represents the relationship between two products. As there are usually predecessor/successor relations, the relation network can be interpreted as a directed graph. The material flow is modelled in form of an edge, material factors and offset times are stored as attributes [3,10, 23, 25, 33]. 

The capabilities offered within SAP SCM extend far beyond the scope of this chapter. The key functionalities we will describe in the following are highlighted in Figure 11.6, which is based on the generic supply chain planning matrix (Figure 11.2) introduced in Section 11.2.1. They are part of the SAP Advanced Planner and... 

Any problem containing discretely valued variables is nonconvex, and such problems may also be solved by the methods described in this chapter. The search methods discussed in Section 10.5 are often applied to supply chain and productionsequencing problems. 

The determination of transfer prices between internal business units is out of the scope models to determine transfer prices in supply chains are described for example by Gjerdmm et al. (2001). 

Finally, all of the case chapters recognize customer centeredness as an imperative for successful organic growth. Each, to one degree or another, describes careful and detailed analysis of customer requirements as the primary consideration in the design of products, services, operations, supply chain dynamics, and customer support systems. 

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