In commerce, supply chain management (SCM) deals with a system of procurement, operations management, logistics and marketing channels, through which raw materials can be developed into finished products and delivered to their end customers. A more narrow definition of supply chain management is the "design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronising supply with demand and measuring performance globally". This can include the movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, finished goods, and end to end order fulfilment from the point of origin to the point of consumption. Interconnected, interrelated or interlinked networks, channels and node businesses combine in the provision of products and services required by end customers in a supply chain.
Logistics is the part of supply chain management that deals with the efficient forward and reverse flow of goods, services, and related information from the point of origin to the point of consumption according to the needs of customers. Logistics management is a component that holds the supply chain together. The resources managed in logistics may include tangible goods such as materials, equipment, and supplies, as well as food and other consumable items.
Inventory or stock refers to the goods and materials that a business holds for the ultimate goal of resale, production or utilisation.
A supply chain is a complex logistics system that consists of facilities that convert raw materials into finished products and distribute them to end consumers or end customers. Meanwhile, supply chain management deals with the flow of goods in distribution channels within the supply chain in the most efficient manner.
The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom "a chain is no stronger than its weakest link". That means that organizations and processes are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them, or at least adversely affect the outcome.
Demand management is a planning methodology used to forecast, plan for and manage the demand for products and services. This can be at macro-levels as in economics and at micro-levels within individual organizations. For example, at macro-levels, a government may influence interest rates to regulate financial demand. At the micro-level, a cellular service provider may provide free night and weekend use to reduce demand during peak hours.
Safety stock is a term used by logisticians to describe a level of extra stock that is maintained to mitigate risk of stockouts caused by uncertainties in supply and demand. Adequate safety stock levels permit business operations to proceed according to their plans. Safety stock is held when uncertainty exists in demand, supply, or manufacturing yield, and serves as an insurance against stockouts.
The business terms push and pull originated in logistics and supply chain management, but are also widely used in marketing and in the hotel distribution business.
The term demand chain has been used in a business and management context as contrasting terminology alongside, or in place of, "supply chain". Madhani suggests that the demand chain "comprises all the demand processes necessary to understand, create, and stimulate customer demand". Cranfield School of Management academic Martin Christopher has suggested that "ideally the supply chain should become a demand chain", explaining that ideally all product logistics and processing should occur "in response to a known customer requirement".
The bullwhip effect is a supply chain phenomenon where orders to suppliers tend to have a larger variability than sales to buyers, which results in an amplified demand variability upstream. In part, this results in increasing swings in inventory in response to shifts in consumer demand as one moves further up the supply chain. The concept first appeared in Jay Forrester's Industrial Dynamics (1961) and thus it is also known as the Forrester effect. It has been described as "the observed propensity for material orders to be more variable than demand signals and for this variability to increase the further upstream a company is in a supply chain". Research at Stanford University helped incorporate the concept into supply chain vernacular using a story about Volvo. Suffering a glut in green cars, sales and marketing developed a program to sell the excess inventory. While successful in generating the desired market pull, manufacturing did not know about the promotional plans. Instead, they read the increase in sales as an indication of growing demand for green cars and ramped up production.
Demand-chain management (DCM) is the management of relationships between suppliers and customers to deliver the best value to the customer at the least cost to the demand chain as a whole. Demand-chain management is similar to supply-chain management but with special regard to the customers.
Supply-chain optimization (SCO) aims to ensure the optimal operation of a manufacturing and distribution supply chain. This includes the optimal placement of inventory within the supply chain, minimizing operating costs including manufacturing costs, transportation costs, and distribution costs. Optimization often involves the application of mathematical modelling techniques using computer software. It is often considered to be part of supply chain engineering, although the latter is mainly focused on mathematical modelling approaches, whereas supply chain optimization can also be undertaken using qualitative, management based approaches.
Order fulfilment is in the most general sense the complete process from point of sales enquiry to delivery of a product to the customer. Sometimes, it describes the more narrow act of distribution or the logistics function. In the broader sense, it refers to the way firms respond to customer orders.
The Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model is a process reference model originally developed and endorsed by the Supply Chain Council, now a part of ASCM, as the cross-industry, standard diagnostic tool for supply chain management. The SCOR model describes the business activities associated with satisfying a customer's demand, which include plan, source, make, deliver, return, and enable. Use of the model includes analyzing the current state of a company's processes and goals, quantifying operational performance, and comparing company performance to benchmark data. SCOR has developed a set of metrics for supply chain performance, and ASCM members have formed industry groups to collect best practices information that companies can use to elevate their supply chain models.
Supply-chain-management software (SCMS) is the software tools or modules used in executing supply chain transactions, managing supplier relationships and controlling associated business processes. Supply chain management maximizes the efficiency of business activities that include planning and management of the entire supply chain. It helps businesses in product development, sourcing, production, and logistics by automating operations. In this way, it increases the physical flow of business as well as informative flow. The entire business benefits with higher performance, greater cost-efficiency, and thus increased supply chain efficiency.
Demand forecasting is the prediction of the quantity of goods and services that will be demanded by consumers at a future point in time. More specifically, the methods of demand forecasting entail using predictive analytics to estimate customer demand in consideration of key economic conditions. This is an important tool in optimizing business profitability through efficient supply chain management. Demand forecasting methods are divided into two major categories, qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods are based on expert opinion and information gathered from the field. This method is mostly used in situations when there is minimal data available for analysis such as when a business or product has recently been introduced to the market. Quantitative methods, however, use available data, and analytical tools in order to produce predictions. Demand forecasting may be used in resource allocation, inventory management, assessing future capacity requirements, or making decisions on whether to enter a new market.
Integrated business planning (IBP) is a process for translating desired business outcomes into financial and operational resource requirements, with the overarching objective of maximizing profit and / or cash flow, while cutting down risk. The business outcomes, on which IBP processes focus, can be expressed in terms of the achievement of the following types of targets:
Channel coordination aims at improving supply chain performance by aligning the plans and the objectives of individual enterprises. It usually focuses on inventory management and ordering decisions in distributed inter-company settings. Channel coordination models may involve multi-echelon inventory theory, multiple decision makers, asymmetric information, as well as recent paradigms of manufacturing, such as mass customization, short product life-cycles, outsourcing and delayed differentiation. The theoretical foundations of the coordination are based chiefly on the contract theory. The problem of channel coordination was first modeled and analyzed by Anantasubramania Kumar in 1992.
Petrolsoft Corporation (1989–2000) was a supply chain management software company with a focus on the petroleum industry. Petrolsoft Corporation was founded at Stanford University in 1989 by Bill Miller and David Gamboa as Petrolsoft Software Group. It was later incorporated in 1992. Petrolsoft introduced demand-driven inventory management to the petroleum industry.
Operations management for services has the functional responsibility for producing the services of an organization and providing them directly to its customers. It specifically deals with decisions required by operations managers for simultaneous production and consumption of an intangible product. These decisions concern the process, people, information and the system that produces and delivers the service. It differs from operations management in general, since the processes of service organizations differ from those of manufacturing organizations.
