Supply Chains and Inventory Management Essay

A. Analyze whether a Keiretsu network, a virtual company, a vertical integration, or a different supply chain strategy should be adopted.

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

Success for many organizations depends on the firm’s ability to balance product and process changes while exceeding customer expectations for improved cost delivery and quality. In lieu of these issues firms have started to implement principles of supply chain management. Supply chain management mainly involves managing the flow of incoming materials, manufacturing operations, and downstream distribution has to be in alignment that is responsive to change in customer demands eliminating a surplus of inventory.

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.

Supply chain management is a practice that involves the planning, supervision, and implementation of strategies and controls to direct the movement of goods and services provided to customers. The intent of this essay is to incorporate a synopsis of existing literature and to provide the reader with a general understanding of how supply chain management correlates with the organizational design and structure of modern firms. The essay comprehensively reviews the components of supply chain management and their integration with functional areas within an organization. The information presented in this essay

Finally, there are those costs that are common to both global and domestic sourcing. Direct labor and materials costs, lead-time costs, transportation costs and inventory costs are a part of both domestic and offshore sourcing. Transportation costs, inventory costs, and lead-time costs tend to be higher when sourcing globally. On the

Timely knowledge regarding their supply chain helps the company in resolving the problem, which ultimately leads in attracting customers and gaining competitive advantage. It is observed that Tesco can easily get the competitive advantage by considering the element of collaboration at the time of formulating their strategies particularly regarding the supply chain activities for the reason that it would assist them to perform their activities in a more effective manner. However, it is a prior duty of the top officials of Tesco to encourage the collaboration technique in order to enhance the productivity and efficiency of their business operations to the utmost level. It is noticed that most of the large-scale organisations are quite keen to consider all possible measures through which they can easily enhance their business operations without any problem just because of the serious competition in the retail market. Furthermore, it is found that the Tesco supplier network and Supplier innovation group help the organisation to approach the right supplier for right place that ultimately improve their logistics operations and differentiate them from their competitors (Jaffeux & Wieser,

Question #2-Define the supply chains for the following products from the first source of raw materials to the first customer. A) Big Mac, B) Gasoline, C) Automobile repair, D) A Text book.

The globalization of organizations and more competitive forces have compelled more manufacturing businesses to improve an efficient supply chain planning for reducing the cost of supply chain. Planning of supply chain is being the critical component of business’ management. Supply chains have conventionally been split, being unsuccessful to assimilate the business utilities in the chain of logistics process. Such difficulties, as extended order lead times, high inventory costs, and struggle in answering proactive to real time variations, having lower profits and weak client goodwill that can be determined by putting together supply chain management schemes for transportation and warehousing. Supply chain can be explained as a combined practice where actually numerous different organizations individuals such as manufactures, retailers, distributors, and suppliers perform together in order to obtain raw materials, transform these raw materials into wanted ultimate products and supply these ultimate products to the vendors. The key methods in this combined procedure are the distribution, logistics, production planning and control. The production and planning steps are two of the most crucial parts to obtain worldwide optimization in supply chain management. And, this should be explained inside the integrated planning infrastructure. Interactive parts of supply chain included key parts such as purchase, production, logistics planning, sale, production and manufacturing

Through the end of the 1980's, most software packages for distributors placed an emphasis on sales and accounting related modules. In the early 1990's, many distributors recognized that they needed help controlling and managing their largest asset, inventory. In response to this need, several computer software companies developed comprehensive inventory management modules and systems. These new packages include many new features, designed to help distributors effectively manage warehouse stock. But after implementing new software, many distributors don't feel that they have gained control of their inventory. These wholesalers continue to face many of the same challenges they experienced with their

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.

According to our class text Supply Chain Management’s goal is to create fast, efficient, and low-cost network of business relationships to get a company’s product from concept to market. In order to understand the goal we must know that the supply chain is the process the raw materials of a product go through in order to be available to the consumer. The relationships that the business creates are needed in order to create the product, each process the product goes through creates value, the supply chain is often called the value chain. Internet technologies are increasingly making the supply chain management process much more efficient and worth the initial investment. The supply chain management life

Managing customer and supplier relationships is an important issue of handle supply chains. The concept of closely aligned relationship has been considered the basic needs of supply chain management. However, supply chain relationships, particularly those involve in product flows, reveals that the central of these relationships is inventory movement and storage. Most of the activity involved in managing relationships is based on the purchase, transfer, or management of inventory. Thus, inventory in supply chain plays a critical role because it is a salient focus of supply chains.

The most important part in supply chain management is managing inventory as company operation tries to minimize cost from supplier, manufacturing, and production. Regarding to inventory, the management accounting must have understand the basic of inventory management. There are a numbers of techniques including: ABC system, EOQ model, TQM, and JIT system. All those several system are relating in managing control as EOQ still has to be considerate in JIT methodology, or quality control is also important part in JIT.

National and International businesses are becoming ever more dependent on logistics and supply chain management in order to keep pace with the demands of an increasingly global economy. This is why business leaders acknowledge that the supply chain can be a value creator and a source of competitive advantage.