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Supply Chain Management
Every organisation that delivers products and services has a
supply chain that needs to be coordinated to ensure quality,
timely deliveries while maximising use of limited resources.
Supply Chain Management (SCM) is therefore a critical area of
information systems for businesses cutting across manufacturing,
construction, retail, healthcare, services, transportation and
utilities industries.
The supply chain begins from the beginning - raw materials in
case of a manufacturing organization or a project specification
in case of services and travels through the complete chain of
events leading to the completion of a product or project and
its delivery to the customer.
The supply chain management process looks at maximising resources
and optimizing processes to ensure best utilization and minimum
costs of creating and delivering quality products and services
to customers.
Most supply chain management systems integrate or build over
an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system of an enterprise.
SCM focusses on elaborate and detailed planning, forecasting,
allocation of resources, scheduling, coordination and reporting
through the entire supply chain of an enterprise.
Successful implementations of SCM have delivered significant
savings in costs and better quality and timely deliveries to
customers. Many SCM systems use sophisticated mathematical modeling
techniques to analyse, schedule and track resource allocations
and optimize time and resources.
A typical supply chain includes the following functions and
activities.
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Planning & Scheduling |
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Order Management |
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Purchase / Procurement |
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Inventory |
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Logistics |
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Transportation |
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Production |
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Quality |
Global Leaders in Supply Chain Management include:
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i2 Technologies |
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Manugistics |
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Oracle |
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