The Five Managers: The Roles Of Supply Chain Management

The Roles of Supply Chain Managers

Supply chain managers have a huge impact on the success of a firm. These managers are engaged in every aspect of the business operation like planning, purchasing, production, transportation, storage and distribution, customer service, and others. Briefly, these managers are the connected the multiple parts of the company. It is their job to help organizations control expenses, boost sales, and maximize profits.

The two extra roles focus on facilitation and collaboration because supply chain managers cover many different parts of the business and this will pt them in the special position to assist a lot of functions implement thir strategies. They are also called upon to diagnose and support the needs of

From the view of the knowledge-based point, it is necessary for specialization since bounded rationality is recognition that human mnd has limited capacity to acquire, store and process knowledge.

The Characteristics of Supply Chain Managers

Supply chain management (SCM) is an important matter in encounter many organizations besides act as an important area that helps improve competitiveness and profitability. Managing the supply chain has become a way of enhance competitiveness by minimize uncertainty and upgrading customer service.

There are few firms which ar successful in achieving a higher level of performance even if they have lanched the supply chain management concepts (Titinan Nakornsri & Sang M. Lee). The several features of supply chain managers are the consistency of leadership when highly efficient companies benefit from consistency in their leadership and most of firms built supply chain orgnizations in the early 80s and have only had several supply chain leaders over the thirty years of process evolution. This kind of leadership coupled with a strong supply chain vision makes a

Ketchen and Guinipero (2003) state that there is a lot of common research areas between supply chain management and strategic management fields. Supply chain strategy is relted to integration of activities associated with procuring supply within the firms, in relations between chains of companies and in inter-organizational networks (Harland et al., 1999).

With increasing strategic importance of supply, the purchasing and supply function can become an important driving force for strategic management of supply chains and that now, the competition is between the supply chains. At same tme, it is specified that firms with higher level of strategic purchasing compared to the firms with lower level can gain a better performance in most aspects of their performance.

The relational capabilities (Dyer, 2000; Dyer and Singh, 1998) can also lead to higher level of strategic purchsing and, in some industries, higher level of strategic purchasing can result in sustainable competitive advantage. Strategic purchasing, therefore, can create a win-win situation for both buyer and seller