Supply Chain Management
For any kind of business, it is essential that their production flow handling of their goods or services would be in top order, starting from the acquisition, handling, and processing of raw components/materials to products, goods or services up until to the delivery of either one of those to the customer themselves. This is where the “Supply Chain Management” practice comes in, to handle the said production flow.
Supply chain management is usually composed of a network of suppliers (which are the “links” of the supply chain) that provides raw materials to the organizations/companies linked to the supply chain. The management aspect of this is composed of six major components, which are listed below:
- Planning
- Sourcing
- Making
- Delivering/Logistics
- Returning
- Enabling
Supply Chain Management Evolution
This type of management has evolved over the years since it was implemented by previous companies and organizations decades before. Modern supply chain management usually revolves around data management, services and products bundling to solutions, which in turn affect product and service quality, deliveries, costs, customer service, and profitability.
Also, it usually takes advantage of generated data by the chain process, which are then curated by each company’s analytical experts and data scientists. Most data curated are analyzed in real-time to ensure efficient data feedback while maintaining minimal latency.
Importance of Supply Chain Management
Minimizing overall costs, wastes, and time used in the production cycle are the benefits of effective supply chain management. However, it is not completely perfect, and it is usually a stopgap by retailers and stores of companies in avoiding empty store shelves due to a shortage of supply.
Due to this, further improvements are being implemented in this system to achieve better benefits from this kind of management, by doing the following:
- Identifying potential problems.
- Optimizing price dynamically.
- “Available to promise” inventory allocation improvements.
Right Software For Digital Supply Chain Management
Due to the constant evolution of the supply chain management, various organizations have taken the management practice digitally, aside from keeping its physical counterpart active, and resulted in the birth of various software that can manage supply chains via digital network akin to a physical network.
This digital version usually handles the supply information being curated to the monitoring of sales that will be the basis for most manufacturers on what to ship to their partnered organizations’ store shelves, reducing unnecessary additional costs for overstocking unneeded inventory.
Supply Chain Management’s Key Features
An effective supply chain management results in good business, with highly profitable returns and very satisfied customers and consumers alike.
The key features of an effective supply chain management are known as the “Five Cs” which are listed below:
- Connected
- Collaborative
- Cyber-aware
- Cognitively-enabled
- Comprehensive
Those features are essential to the digital aspect of supply chain management due to it being connected via cloud-based commerce, which in turn connects to the physical side of supply chain management resulting in a complex and continuous system that handles organizational supply inventory for their partnered stores and retailer branches.