What is Supply Chain?

Supply chain (SC) is the combination of art and science that goes into improving the way your company finds the raw components it needs to make a product or service and deliver into customers. The following are five basic components of SC. 1. Plan This is the strategic portion of SC. Companies need a strategy for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for their product or service. A big piece of SC planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, costs less and delivers high quality and value to customers. 2. Source Next, companies must choose suppliers to deliver the goods and services they need to create their product. Therefore, supply chain managers must develop a set of pricing, delivery and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships. And then, SC managers can put together processes for managing their goods and services inventory, including receiving and verifying shipments, transferring them to the manufacturing facilities and authorizing supplier payments. 3. Make This is the manufacturing step. Supply chain managers schedule the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging and preparation for delivery. This is the most metric-intensive portion of the supply chainone where companies are able to measure quality levels, production output and worker productivity. 4. Deliver This is the part that many SC insiders refer to as logistics, where companies coordinate the receipt of orders from customers, develop a network of warehouses, pick carriers to get products to customers and set up an invoicing system to receivepayments. 5. Return This can be a problematic part of the supply chain for many companies. Supply chain planners have to create responsive and flexible network for receiving defective and excess products back from their customers and supporting customers who have problems with delivered products..

Overview While many supply chains now operate efficiently, few organisations truly realise their full potential. Often this is due to a lack of the appropriate alignment of strategic and operational objectives. Our goal is to bridge this gap then prioritise and implement sustainable performance improvements. All supply chains have three key enablers - people, process and technology, however, only effective supply chains can optimise the balance of these enablers. Velocity recognises this, combined with cross industry experience and a proven methodology; we can unlock the potential of supply chains.

Objective Maximize the overall value generated is the difference between what thefinal product is worth to the customer and the effort the supply chainsexpends in filling the request of the customer Supply chain profitability is the difference between the revenue generatedfrom the customer and the overall cost across the supply chain It is the total profit to be shared across all supply chain stages Supply chain success is measured in terms of supply chain profitability andnot in terms of the profits at an individual stage Revenue is from customer positive cash flow All other cash flows are simply fund exchanges that occur within the supplychain given that different stages have different owners All flows of information, product or funds generates costs within the supplychain Supply chain management involves the management of flows between andamong stages in a supply chain to maximize total supply chain profitability

SUPPLY CHAIN STRATEGY This phase, given the Marketing & pricing plans for a product. Decisions about how to structure of the supply chain over the next several years. Strategic supply chain decisions. How resources will be allocated. Locations and capacities of facilities. Products to be made or stored at various locations. Modes of transportation. Information systems. Supply chain design decisions are long-term and expensive to reverse must take into account uncertainty in anticipated market conditions. Used for increasing the Supply Chain Surplus during this phase.

Why Supply chain is important in IT company?

Supply chain is very important because of flow of goods from one destination to other destination with cost effective and on timely delivery of goods to the business needs and gives the profit to the organisation. Supply Chain consists of many trading partners, from raw materials to finished products. Typical supply chain is denoted as below, Supplier-->Manufacturer-->Wholesaler-->Retailer each party consists of 5 logistics activities, namely, customer service, production planning, purchasing, warehousing and transportation. Logistics focuses on activities inside a company while supply chain focuses on relationship between each company.

Supply Chain Management is important because of relationship between each party. If every party join hand and work together, it will create cost savings and time to market reduction and everyone will enjoy the benefit.