Critical Review On Agile Supply Chain Management

A supply chain is a net work of firms. Thus, each firm in the chain should build its own supply chains to support the competitive priorities of its services or products. Two distinct designs used to competitive advantage are efficient supply chains and responsive supply chains. Efficient supply chains work best in environments where demand is highly predictable. The focus of the supply chain is on efficient flows of services and materials keeping inventories to a minimum. The firm’s competitive priorities are low-cost operations, consistent quality, and on-time delivery. Responsive supply chains designed to react quickly in order to hedge against uncertainties in demand. Work best when firms offer a great variety of services or products and demand predictability is low. Typical competitive priorities are development speed, fast delivery times, customization, variety, volume flexibility, and top quality. Tables below show the environments and design features that best suit each design.

Mellat-Parast and Spillan (2014) defines supply chain management as the method of handling material and information moves from the beginning, through the organization, and to the end-user. This is a very important factor of organizational strategy.

The lean supply chain helps to imrprove efforts focusing waste, improve manufacturing schedule and economically produce small quantities. It is also flexible to react to changes in the market. Hence, BMW has this facility of allowing a customer to change its order within a week of placing and still maintain the original delivery time and high quality. Similarly, agile supply chain helps in carrying a generic inventory. The best part is that it helps in reducing risk of keeping too much stock as well as being out of stock. Mass-customization can be easily pursued through an agile supply chain which offers variety at a lower total

Research also can establish the services valued by all customers versus those valued only by various segments. Then the company should apply a disciplined, cross-functional process to develop a menu of supply chain programs and develop segment-specific service packages that combine basic services for anybody with the services from the menu that will have the greatest appeal to particular segments. This does not mean tailoring for the sake of tailoring. The goal is to find the degree of segmentation and variation needed to optimize

Under the lean production approaches, a number of factors are essential to the process for

“Lean means creating more value for customers with less” (Krejewski, L., Ritzman, L.P., & Malhotra, M.K., 2013). Implementing this into a project can make the project very successful at a lower rate of cost and time. There are five steps in allowing the lean process to work successfully. This process is easy to remember but not always easy to achieve. Specifying the value from the customer’s point of view of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing is the first step. Identifying all the steps of value for the product the customer wants to purchase and eliminating the steps that are unnecessary is the second step. Creating a sequence of steps that flow in a consistent fashion and will flow smoothly toward the customer is the third step. Introducing the flow of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing and allowing the customer to pull value from the product is the fourth step. The fifth and final step in the lean technique process is “as value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste” (Lean Enterprises Institute, 2015).

The simplest level of supply chain management is to make inventory readily available to meet customer demand. Without inventory, there is nothing available to draw customers in. Through their resources, organizations must meet supply with demand in a timely fashion. Supply chain partners should work together to increase resource productivity, develop standardized processes, and minimize the level of inventory. These steps will reduce an organization’s waste, costs, and raise supply chain efficiency.

In a finished product, out of most of the industries only one particular company, provide a very little amount of the total value. Hence to improve the process within the company lean techniques are used so that the total impact will not be high when it is applied to a broader supply chain.

Lean is defines the manufacturing philosophy that reduces the time between the shipping and customer demand, which based on the systematic method by eliminating waste, that means giving the customer what they want when they want it, and don 't waste whatever. Rahmana, Sharif and Esa (2013) suggested lean production is mentioned to improve the company 's performance from the philosophy in reducing waste in order. That means, lean system destination is the decrease cost by removing the non-value activities, which they are applying a category of tools and techniques for checking and eliminating defective in the production process. In the Evenort Company should emulate the five overriding principles of lean thinking in terms of implementing lean that there is guarantee the company has been driving correctly in the lean manufacturing (Cardiff 2015) as can show in table 1.

This article is about supply chain management (SCM). Its importance in the field of operation management. Supply chain management was discussed from the past three decades. This article tells about how supply chain management developed and how it will proceed in the future. The term “supply chain management” first appeared in the practitioner literature in 1982, which said that SCM is a way to manage resources and assets in a better way.

The supply chain management basically involves processes and activities which are involved in the planning, organising, controlling and implementing the cost effective flow of goods from the point of origin to the point of consumption. The whole process will have different players like the supplier, manufacturer, distributor, retailers and the customers themselves as the end point of consumption. The supply chain has changed drastically over the years. This days they are very global in nature. Involving various complex interactions and flow of goods, data and funds between companies which are situated in different countries and continents. Even though the companies are spread across the world the manufacturing plants generally follow a similar structure which normally comprises of the suppliers, manufacturing plants, distributors, retailers, inbound and outbound logistics providers. There were a lot of challenges which arose because of the

The effectiveness of this lean method will ensure the elimination of waste while still maintaining high quality control of their product, which in return increases their profitability and

Supply chain management is a main process in all kinds of companies. That’s because an optimized supply chain results in lower costs and a faster production cycle.

Lean Six Sigma processes are used by many businesses without it being realized. Many companies today are adopting the Lean Six Sigma processes to aid in cost reduction and waste management. The Six Sigma program aids in eliminating the negative effects caused by variations within the supply chain. The Lean process is all about the speed, flow and elimination of waste concerning inventory. Although Lean and Six Sigma are separate programs, they complement each other. Together these two programs provide supply chains with a tool that eliminates, “unnecessary inventories through disciplined efforts to understand and reduce variation, while increasing speed and flow in the supply chain.”(Lean Logistics Understanding) Lean and Six Sigma

Lean Manufacturing focuses on eliminating non-value added processes and waste and try to produce only to satisfy customer demand.