The Pros And Cons Of Supply Chain Management

processes managed across multiple echelons of a product supply chain. SCM has never been more important to business than it is currently, or will be in the near future. It has the potential of production/engineering in the industrial revolution and marketing of the 1920s and 1930s when each of these gained prominence in business. SCM often is the basis for a firms competitive strategy, which is driven by increased outsourcing, expanding global operations, and heightened need for logistics customer service. Not only has managing supply chain costs become more important, as these costs are used in trade-off with production costs, but supply chain strategy is increasingly viewed as a source for contributing to the revenues of the firm. “Logistics

Some academics openly declare that they use the terms supply chain management and purchasing “synonymously” (Stuart, 1997).Pragmatically there may be much to commend this but the identification with one function and one process seems to miss much of the idea of supply chain or network management. Others evidently have a more expanded notion in mind, for example, the lean supply approach focused on the “purchasing activities of vehicle assemblers and the supply activities of the component (and component system) manufacturers”(Lamming, 1996, p. 183). Accordingly, Lamming argues, for the merits of the

Clearly, excitement and focus are directed toward supply chain management. First, we can say the supply chain management is concerned with realizing the opportunities from integrated management of product flow processes across functions and between channel members. Although the idea is potent and the benefits obvious, the notion of lowering costs by including more of a system in decision making is not new. It is a surprising fact that researchers develop supply chain models mostly for improving business operations. Few, particularly academic researchers, do not realize that the research on academic SCM may also be conducted for their own educational institutions. The performance of the SCM depends on the seamless coordination of all supply chain stakeholders to ensure attainment of desirable outcomes. Supply chain relationships are not inherently steady-state, so examples of good supply chain coordination among a few firms will be selective and short term. Because coalitions are fragile and the members may easily return to the state of their self interest when trust is broken, information is incomplete or inaccurate, and the sharing of benefits is perceived to be or is actually unfair, there are likely to be few examples of real supply chain cooperation spanning many echelons in the channel. Therefore, we can expect only isolated examples where extensive channel cooperation has