Managing the Global Supply Chain in an Uncertain World

Supply Chain Opportunity in an Uncertain Economic Recovery, by Eric G. Olson, discusses the advantages the supply chain has in a struggling economic recovery, when most other companies are dealing with uncertainty. The authors’ intention contained in this article is to discuss opportunities that businesses have to grow their operations despite coming out of a severe recession. The author identifies to take advantage of these opportunity, companies must be willing to be more flexible and that scalability is much easier to implement coming out of a severe recession. The author provides a design, methodology, and approach to implement these changes, highlighting the scalability and flexibility benefits, mitigation if multiple risks, identification supply chain opportunities.

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The single most important issue is the author presents a direct understanding concerning current supply chain within today’s corporations during an economic recession. With the need to scale back supply chain operations during the recession, many companies are trying to find ways to revamp their strategies, re-build relationships and gear towards a more cost effective perspective. There have been numerous tools and resources implemented that will allow them to flourish. More so the author believes that businesses should look outside of labor operations and more towards a

A company involved in manufacturing medical devices decides to begin sourcing components internationally. As for now, it operates in the United States and Germany only. So, senior management should assess the relative manufacturing costs worldwide to choose where to source. This decision will be made based on manufacturing costs.

The use of traditional warehousing techniques is still prevalent in warehouses today. Picking and putting away products, followed by clipboard documentation worked well for many businesses though out the years and they have a hard time with embracing the change that technology and its efficiency would bring to their warehouse operations. Many warehouse operations are incorporating this change, “There is a move away from traditional warehousing with shelves and racks for storage to more of a flow-through operation, such as cross-docking, plus some light manufacturing or assembly and kitting,” noted by Adrian Gonzalez, senior analyst with the ARC Advisory Group of Dedham, Mass. The days of

The best organizations worldwide are discovering a strong new supply of competitive advantage. It 's known as supply chain management and it encompasses all of those built-in activities that bring product to market and create satisfied customers. The supply Chain management program integrates issues from manufacturing operations, purchasing, transportation, and physical distribution into a unified program. Positive supply chain management, then, coordinates and integrates all of these hobbies right into a seamless approach. It embraces and hyperlinks all of the companions within the chain. In addition to the departments within the group, these partners comprise vendors, carriers, third party companies, and information programs vendors.

“The best supply chains aren’t just fast and cost effective, they are also agile and adaptable and they ensure that all their companies interests stay aligned.”- Hall L Lee

According to David Blanchard a Supply chain is the sequence of events that cover a product’s entire life cycle, from conception to consumption. The end of Second World War has seen an escalation of globalisation as countries become borderless. This has been fuelled by sharp improvement in technology, which has enable businesses across the globe to communicate and open doors to new opportunities. In addition, the implementation of international institutions and cooperation such as the WTO, the UN and the EU has helped establish a global peace and make business across border more transparent and slick than ever. The reality is that the world now depends on trade, as the physical movement of goods between locations remain a core part of

Evolution of the supply chain stems from Physical internet. Montreuil“If you think about the early days of computers, people loved using them, but they had no way to connect their computers to a community,” he says. “To get connectivity, we looked to transportation for a model and the information superhighway became the metaphor for the Internet.” The Physical internet approach is influenced by the internet network system where information is moved globally efficiently. The Supply chain system could use the Internet as a metaphor for a new way to move physical objects through the supply chain. As said by Meller “Imagine an EBay like exchange with all freight specified based on smart modular containers and visible to a vast community of users that rate each other to drive performance’’. This is a decentralised system that enables networking by aligning and coordinating the processes between customers’ suppliers and providers to manage logistics units efficiently and in a sustainable manner.

However, to deal with intensification of competition and dynamic demands, the company was proactive in forming business alliance to pull product into the marketplace quickly. In this way, the company was exhibiting an agile approach. Company 4, premium brand manufacturer/retailer, also concentrated on building relationships, again to achieve leagility in the supply chain. This was mandatory as the company was dealing with a high quality fashion product with small batch quantities. In summary, they concluded companies in textiles and clothing needed to be able to respond quickly to changing markets and be able to provide quick replenishment. However, they were not able to store large quantities as products had a very short life cycle and fashion markets were seasonal. Therefore, the textiles and clothing industry did not neatly fit into either a lean or agile supply chain paradigm, but instead it was a combination of the two paradigms, leagile. Agarwal et al. (2006) presented a framework for modelling and assessing the performance of lean, agile and leagile supply chain on the basis interdependent variables. Considering the performance of supply chain which implies how much the supply chain is responsive to the needs of the markets, they implemented and utilized the framework for modelling performance of lean, agile and leagile supply chain. By using the framework, they could analyse the

The paper takes a look at one of the most popular topics in all the international companies, which is Supply Chain Management. The study starts by letting you know how it all started, and to explain to the reader what is supply chain, what it is made of, and how it is implemented in companies. The next part will let the reader know how this can help your company going forward, the benefits, and how it improves your company. The next part of this paper will be dealing with the new trends affecting Supply Chain Management, mainly on how technology have let Supply Chain Management improve to make it more effective and sufficient, and also the rising concerns about the environment, and how supply chain management went green.

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On Amazon 's global site, people from around the world can purchase items, from clothes to toys to food and have them shipped directly to their front door. While this can seem to be a great opportunity, shipping logistics can be a nightmare for Amazon and take extensive amounts of time for the buyer. One student, Xiao Bixue, from Beijing, China explained that the quality of goods from Amazon are good, but the “tariffs” are expensive and shipping takes time (Bixue and Xinling). With the differences in cultures and distance to consider, how can Amazon expect to compete globally?

Key Words: Humes, Manufacturing, Supply chain Management, Supply chain models, Business functions, Key business drivers.

Till not to long ago the area of Supply Chain management was seen as a task that took place in the background without any dedicated resources. Majority of the people thought it was only used by large brands that have an international distribution need. When there was an issue in the supply chain, people were pulled from their existing jobs to fix the issue. Once the problem was solved, the people would go back to their original tasks.