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Supply Chain Management and Continuous Improvement
In today world, supply chain management plays important role in businesses. In order to create efficient supply chain, right approach is essential. This essay will explain about Lean synchronization one of the most popular supply chain philosophy, role of talent and technology, and four principles to success in continuous improvement.
There are many ways to improve supply chain in the competitive environment. Lean synchronization is considered one of the best techniques. In this essay, I will focus on lean philosophy. Lean philosophy target are producing perfect quality of products and reducing waste. The most important part of lean philosophy is focus on eliminate all of the waste. Waste can
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(Slack. et al, 2013) The roles of technology and talents are involved with continuous improvement. For the technology role, “If you think expensive technology changes are the gatekeepers for continuous improvement, think again”(Keller, 2011). Continuous improvement focuses mainly on quality, cost, delivery, and services in business processes. After that identify and improve the processes that contribute these factors. There is no doubt that generally technology cause the occurrence of continuous improvement; however, the company can improve these processes without absolute needed of technology. The company could improve the business processes with continuous improvement tools and techniques. Technology role is essential in the processes such as production, design, and information system (Keller, 2011). On the other hand, talent appears to be more essential than technology. Gonsalvez (2014) claims that although technology and talent are the key factors in the quest of continuous improvement, technologies grow in the faster pace than companies able to adapted and perceived those new technologies. The knowledge of supply chain from talent emerges to be more important. Talent is needed to coordinate technology and knowledge along with effectively operates this combination in the company (Gonsalvez, 2014). To be talent in supply chain management is required more than supply chain knowledge “ modern-day supply chain management is about much more than coordinating the physical movement of goods from one point to another. It encompasses procurement expertise, supplier management, knowledge of international trade trends and regulations, information-technology prowess and customer-relationship management, to name but a few key aspects of the discipline ” (Bowman, 2013). Also there are demanding skill that needed to be in supply chain management role. Supply chain management is not just math. This
Every business has an evolutionary clock speed measuring the rate of change in products, processes and capability. At the core of everything is the organizations ability to design a sustainable supply chain. When this becomes an organizations core competency, they are then positioned to continually win the temporary advantage. By simultaneously working to improve products, process design/creation and supply chains (three dimensional concurrent engineering), a company can drive the “turn of the helix” thus changing the clock speed for the industry.
In the 1960s through the 1970s, companies realized strong engineering, design, and manufacturing functions were strong market strategy keys to create and capture customer loyalty. As the demand for new products rose in the 1980s, these market requirements were to increase their flexibility and responsiveness to adapt existing products and processes or to develop new ones in order to meet customer needs. As manufacturing improved in the 1990s, managers began noticing material and service inputs involving suppliers and their major impact on an organization’s ability to meet customer needs. As a result of these changes, organizations now find that it difficult to manage their own organizations. First, they must be involved in the management of their network of all upstream firms that provide directly or indirectly, as well as the network of downstream firms, which are responsible for delivery and market service of the product to the end customer. In order to succeed, managers have to realize that they cannot do it alone and they must work together on a daily basis with the whole organizations in their supply chains. Because supply chain management involves all functions within an organization, managers need to know what a supply chain is, why it is important, and the impact of supply chain management on the success and profitability of their organization. Today, Wal-Mart topped the list of the America’s biggest companies on the Fortune 500 list, “with sales of almost $345 billion — more than a quarter of a trillion dollars” (Forbs). Wal-Mart’s supply chain management is becoming recognized as a core competitive strategy.
This report has clearly in detail described the meaning, benefits as well as the need and challenges of the RFID in the supply chain system. While RFID comes with a larger magnitude of benefits than the bar code, it’s an expensive medium and comes at a price that may be prohibitive to many businesses. On the one hand, RFID is advantageous in different areas of the supply chain and does not require line-of-sight scanning; it helps in labor reduction, enhances visibility of products and processes , and helps in inventory management. On the other hand, RFID is an expensive solution, lacking benchmarks or standards, suffers from some adverse deployment issues, and suffers from major privacy concerns. However with the ultimate aim to see the establishment of item-level tracking which should act to revolutionize SCM practices, RFID is here to stay.
Lean manufacturing and just-in-time processing are great business strategies that can severely stress a supply chain. The supply chain and supply chain management is a critical operations management element for any major company to succeed and remain competitive in the global market. The supply chain is one of many pieces critical to maximizing value to the end customer and requires close management to minimize external impacts. If a company is relying on another company to supply the raw materials needed for their production line, then impacts to this other company could impact their supply chain. Careful risk management is needed to optimize performance. As a company expands into global markets and global suppliers, this risk and management challenge is multiplied. The global nature of the company could impact important activities such as transportation, funds transfers, suppliers, distributors, accounting and information sharing. Disruption to the supply chain can significantly reduce revenue, cut market share, inflate costs and threaten production. A major disruption would have obvious impacts to profit, but could have additional intangible impacts to the credibility of the company if products are not delivered on time.
Supply chain management has been defined as that process that involves the management of information, materials, and all the finances that are handled within and across the entire supply chain process (Christopher, 2016). The management is usually done through out the entire supply chain management from that moment when the suppliers are involved through all the manufacturing activities, different distribution activities, and the way that the products are served to the final product consumer (Turban, et al., 2002). The process also includes all the activities that different organizations offers to their customers as after sale services for purposes perfecting their services and products towards their highly valued customers (Christopher,
"A lot of companies think of supply chain as a cost centre. They don’t always see it as helping to funnel top-line growth." Supply chain touches practically every part of operations inside an organization: from determining client interest, to sourcing crude materials, to assembling, distribution and returns Supply chain is to adjust supply and request, for example the demand for goods and services. You need to get the right quantity and quality of goods and services
Today’s organizations are faced with increasing levels of global competition, customer’s demanding value for their money and high stakeholders expectations on investment returns. Gattorna (2003), notes that firms are now pursuing supply chain management as a strategy to competitive advantage. Firms in a supply chain relate, transact, and partner on different levels; from product design and development to product delivery. Through supply chain management a firm pursues value creation through timely product delivery, cost management, inventory control and customer service (Beamon, 1999).They do so individually or through synergies formed with other organizations to increase customer service
By implementing smarter supply chains which is used in creating good relationship among the suppliers, using the best of the technology to increase visibility , enhances the agility by the use of lean technologies and can be used to proper decision making will enable the Indian automotive Industry to gain competitive advantage over
Supply chain training plays a great role for company’s strategic development. The training has a great impact to make a business successful and profitable. That is the reason; now most of the companies are willing to implement the training within the organization.
In all, supply chain operation management has helped many global companies in handling and distributing their products as it is a one-stop solution provider from one warehouse direct to end user. By building trust among the trading partners with effective communications would improve performance metrics both the company and the solutions provider.
The key performance drivers of Supply Chain Management (SCM) are - facility effectiveness, inventory effectiveness, transportation effectiveness, information effectiveness, sourcing effectiveness, pricing effectiveness, delivery effectiveness, quality effectiveness and service effectiveness. These drivers include various performance markers that may be measured quantitatively by gathering information and applying them in SPSS. The works here may principally be quantitative with spellbinding measurable investigation. In the current world, practical supply chain management to help the triple primary concern, (nature, domain, and economy) is likewise included in the extent of supply chain performance drivers. This is relatively a quite new research region.
The author has portrayed his view to attain the objective of lean tools and techniques by eliminating the increase of time and cost, the lean thinking on manufacturing shortens the time of the customer’s order and the shipment duration. The five-major principle of lean are as follows:
One of the components of Walmart’s supply chain in which their success is heavily relied on is the continuous improvement of their supply management as a whole, particularly within their e-commerce division. According to an article on the website logistics company Cerasis, “Not only has Walmart excelled over the decades in traditional supply chain management, but. is also focused on continuous improvement by investing more into emerging technologies to capture more of the e-commerce market.” (University of San Francisco, 2015). A concept that our class discussed time and time again throughout the semester was the concept of continuous improvement.
KAIZEN APPROACH TO SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: FIRS STEP FOR TRANSFORMING SUPPLY CHAIN INTO LEAN SUPPLY CHAIN.
In the first week we discussed supply chain maturity, supply chain strategy and the ten traits of the best supply chains as which are presented in the textbook, Diagnosing greatness: Ten traits of the best supply