Globalization Of Production And Utilization

3. How can supply chain design and integration help John Wolf reduce investment and space requirements while maintaining adequate service levels?

Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, Volume 7, Number 5, 2002, pp. 271 – 282;

The supply chain management is considered as a management concept from past two decades as the customers are concerned about timely and safe delivery. The competitiveness has been increasing among the companies to deliver the products as quickly as possible to the customers all around the world. This has made the supply chain management as a vital tool for the management. This is also measured as a competitive parameter for the companies.

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.

Supply chains manage the movement of products from the acquisition of raw materials through production and finally distribution to the end user. A properly designed supply chain can create many opportunities to drive down cost and increase revenue opportunities. In order to create a supply chain that is sustainable and flexible it is necessary to identify and align company goals and initiatives with the manufacturing and distribution of products.

Supply chain management has created much enthusiasm for late years for various reasons. Numerous supervisors now understand that moves made by one individual from the chain can impact the gainfulness of all others in the chain. Firms are progressively thinking as far as contending as a feature of a supply chain against other supply chains, as opposed to as a solitary firm against other individual firms.

2. It is challenging to design and operate a supply chain so that total systemwide

Simchi, D., Kaminsky, P., Shankar, R. (2008). Designing and managing the supply chain: concepts, strategies, and case studies, 3, 384-385.

Logistics is one of the main functions within a company, and the supply chain is a complex and sometime fragile global endeavor dependent on a network of independent, yet interconnected, moving parts. It requires professional management. Supply chain professionals order the product, build it, move it, ship it, distribute it, and drive the coordination processes with marketing, sales, engineering, manufacturing, finance, and information technology. In short, they make any business effort seem effortless.

Effective supply chain management can provide an important competitive advantage for a business marketer, resulting in improved communication and involvement among members of the chain, increased motivation, and decreased costs. Tracking the movement of and demand for components used to manufacture a product across a variety of potential and actual suppliers, provides insight and the ability to respond instantly to shortages, surpluses, and changes in market conditions. It seeks to optimize production, decrease manufacturing time, minimize inventory, streamline order fulfillment, and reduce cost.

When dealing with closed loop supply chains, complexity increases, management information systems may have to be restructured, and uncertainty may also build up. “Several sources of uncertainty were identified such as demand, availability of raw materials, prices, promotion of new products and for the closed-loop supply chains uncertainty in the amount of non-conformance products or on the level of returnable end of life products”.(Cardoso,Science direct). Demand levels and other

Many companies produce products from parts of raw materials that are purchased from suppliers, till these products are reach the markets and presented for the customers, then you have the supply chain starting from the purchase of raw material from different areas , through the manufacturing steps and stages till is being sold by the consumer. Some of supply chains are well defined and easy to determined, while there are other supply chains complex to analyze. However, supply chains vary with the size of the facility such as; complexities, performance, abilities, flexibility, quality, speed, dependability and cost of preparing goods for manufacturing and the chain length distribution. So the supply chain is a network of wholesalers, retailers, distributors, workers in the transport, storage facilities, suppliers, and manufacturers who participate in the production, delivery and sale of the product to the last consumer. A supply chain is a group of facilities that coordinate activities among it and to avoid the competitors. Moreover, to ensure the supply chain management is operating efficiently and generating the highest level of customer

Supply chains represent the procurement, production and distribution activities of an organisation. Within a supply chain, these activities are viewed as linked and reliant on one another to produce the final outcome. It is believed that if one component of the chain fails, the whole chain is broken and product/service delivery goals will not be achieved.

Based upon his ten years research on supply chain issues in diverse industries such as food, fashion, apparel and automobiles he devises a framework which will help

1We would like to thank Shiming Deng for his valuable contributions to the preparation of this manual.