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As Illustrated By The Foregoing, The Areas Comprising Supply Chain ...

As illustrated by the foregoing, the areas comprising supply chain management are complex, representing a broad array of areas, inter linkages and relationships that work in combination and impact each other in sophisticated ways.

Supply Chain in Business Organization

The importance of the functioning of the supply chain in terms of the business operations and organization can not be over emphasized. It represents the core of how the company produces its products and then gets them to its varied markets, whether the company is a manufacturer, supplier or retailer, the delivery of the right number of product to the right locations at the right time is the functional aspect of being and remaining in business. An illustration of this importance is illustrated in the automotive industry as well as computers. The production of automotive vehicles represents a supply system comprising on average 20,000 parts (Kim et al, 2002). The preceding comprises a long hierarchical supply chain that consists of several supplier levels.

An explanation of the preceding is evidenced by the utilization of manufacturing of dashboards as an example. The automotive manufacturer out sources the module to a primary supplier who in turn out sources varied sub parts to other suppliers, who may or may not out source their segment of the dashboard component they are responsible to deliver within a specific time frame back to the source they received their order from who in turn does the same. The complex nature of coordination is obvious and further exacerbated by the fact that in a hierarchical supply chain the time for information exchange is lengthened and can result in frequent errors, thus inefficiency in the automotive industry representing design, development, procurement, logistics and manufacturing abound (Kim et al, 2002.

The key example of supply chain efficiency is demonstrated by Dell Computer which was ranked as the top supply chain operation in 2004 and 2005 based upon a study by AMR Research (AMR Research, 2005), leading:
2).Proctor & Gamble
3).IBM
4).Nokia
5).Toyota Motor
6).Johnson & Johnson
7).Samsung Electronics
8).Wal-Mart
9).Tesco
10). Johnson Controls
11). Intel
12.) Anheuser-Busch
13). Woolworths
14). The Home Depot
15). Motorola
16). PepsiCo
17). Best Buy
18). Cisco Systems
19). Texas Instruments
20). Lowe's
21). L'Oreal
22). Publix Super Markets
23). Sysco
25). Coca-Cola
The importance of listing the preceding indicates the difficulties the automotive as well as computer firms are having. Maintaining and increasing market share is a function of increased productivity, quality and lower costs as well as delivering a product to market on time. Internally, this means that business organizations need to optimize the manner in which they do business throughout their organization.


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