What is Supply Chain Management?

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Introduction: With the advent of globalization and continuous evolution in technology in the last 4 decades, the whole structure of organizations have evolved. Globalization has led to the downfall, of once successful, companies which were stagnant while led to exponential growth of continuously evolving companies. Supply chain, which was once considered a small part of operations, has now become one of the most important departments. “The term Supply chain management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and all logistics management activities.” as quoted by the council of Supply Chain Management Professionals.[1] In current competitive environment, to attain utmost customer loyalty and at the same time minimize cost, companies are becoming extremely dependant on the efficiency of supply chain. In the recent years supply chain has transformed from treating each action as a separate unit to combining all actions, by systematic information sharing, to attain maximum profit. The tedious and complex process of supply chain has significantly benefited with the introduction of Information Technology. [2] Some of the major challenges in efficient supply chain are to manage the inventory and prevent stock out and efficient sharing of information amongst different departments, suppliers and customers. Since it’s emergence in 1900’s RFID has been implemented in supply chain by major global players in varied sectors such as Walmart in retail, Cognizent in I.T and Gardeur A.G in Clothing.[3] RFID has been the most comprehensive introduction in supply chain to overcome the various shortcomings of bar codes technology. As quoted by Omar Massoud Salim Hassan Ali in his... ... middle of paper ... ...3/11/14/benefits-of-implementing-rfid-in-supply-chain-management.aspx > last accessed 5/24/2014. [8] Research Paper by Langer, Kekre, and Scheller-Wolf, Topic: Assessing the impact of RFID on Return Centre Logistics, [Online] URL < http://scheller.gatech.edu/directory/faculty/forman/pubs/rfid-interfaces.pdf > Last Accessed 05/24/2014 [9] Research Paper by Tim Butcher, Topic: The social-technical impact of RFID on supply chain management, [online] URL < http://www2.hull.ac.uk/hubs/pdf/memorandum57.pdf > Last accessed 05/24/2014 [10] Research Paper by Katina Michael and Luke McCathei, Topic: The pros and cons of RFID in supply chain management, [online] URL < http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1104&context=infopapers > last accessed 05/24/2014 [11] Research Paper by Sunita Mall and Sidharth Mishra, Topic: RFID and supply chain management.

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