Week 14

Question 1

What is supply chain management?

Answer 1

Supply chain management is the management of relationships and flows between operations and processes.
Technically, it is different from supply network management, which looks at all the operations or processes in a network, but the two terms are often used interchangeably

Many of the principles of managing external supply chains (flows between operations) are also applicable to internal supply chains

Question 2

How should supply chain compete?

Answer 2

The central objective of supply chain management is to satisfy the needs of the end customer.

each operation in the chain (and each chain in the supply network) should contribute to whatever mix of quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost that the end customer requires.

Individual operations failure in any of these objectives can be multiplied throughout the chain 9so even if the operation performance is adequate the performance of the whole chain could be poor

An important distinction between lean and agile supply chain performance.

Lean