What Is Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Management is a seamless concatenation of various supply chain entities, activities and other components leading to the smooth run of sourcing, production and logistics functions and resulting in delivery of products or services at the right time, right place and for a right price.

A well managed supply chain is a great strategic as well as competitive advantage to the participating organizations as it ensures the optimized utilization of their resources and delivery of a highly cost effective products or services. Use of technology also plays a very crucial role to integrate supply chain components and gives rise to a highly efficient automated system which seeks to meet the supply with demand or vice versa with the optimum utilization of resources and minimal inventory.

Supply chain management may sound like a simple process but actually it is a very complicated process which even for a simple product, involves several sub-processes, activities and variety of costs. The following video gives you a very clear picture of what actually supply chain management is:

What Is A Supply Chain

Supply chain encompasses everything from determining the source of the materials, procuring the materials, warehousing the materials, producing the finished goods, warehousing the finished goods, determining the means of transportation and transportation routes, distributing goods to distribution centers/channel partners/end customers as well as the system required to run these operations in a perfect coordination. A supply chain can also be defined as -"A complicated collaboration between the multiple organizations and their operations for the common goal of making cumulative efforts to source, produce, warehouse and distribute the products or services for the use of the end consumers".

These may sound only few number of operations but each one of them is an intricate area in itself, so complex that a complex supply chain can be compared with a nervous system in a human body which consists of neurons, axons, dendrites and synapses. Just like sometimes some neurons may not be directly connected to each other but they still have an effect on the each others' functions, different organizations or other entities of a complex supply chain may not be directly connected to each other but they may have a direct or indirect impact on each others' operations and performances.

Welcome to SCM Champ

My passion for Supply Chain Management and love for technology have long been encouraging me to start this blog. I always promised myself to initiate this wonderful blog one day but after a long series of procrastinations,  today I am finally initiating "SCMChamp: A Supply Chain Management Blog".

Every time I go to a store and buy a packet of bread or a gallon of milk, the first thing comes to mind is- "Here we go, end of another successful supply chain cycle.....Hurray!". My avid interest in Supply Chain Management has made it a part of my everyday contemplation and my long suffering from technophilia, specially my love for SAP has worked as an immense catalytic force behind my great enthusiasm for continuous business process improvements in supply chain arena.

My deepest intent is to run this blog as a unique knowledge sharing and discussion platform to understand:

• Important Supply Chain Concepts
• Role of technology in supply chain management
• Supply Chain Processes in SAP centric environment
• Various supply chain related issues and challenges
• The best supply chain practices

Folks, wish me good luck to achieve this objective.