Supply Chain Strategy Essay

Words: 1593
Pages: 7

Supply-Chain Management

Supply-chain management consists of developing a strategy to organize, control, and motivate the resources involved in the flow of services and materials within the supply chain. A supply chain strategy, an essential aspect of supply chain management, seeks to design a firm’s supply chain to meet the competitive priorities of the firm’s operations strategy.

1 Supply Chain Strategy Across the Organization

Supply chains must be managed to coordinate the inputs with the outputs in a firm to achieve the appropriate competitive priorities of the firm’s enterprise processes. The Internet offers firms an alternative to traditional methods for managing supply chains. A supply chain strategy is essential

2 Mass customization

Mass customization is a strategy whereby a firm’s flexible processes generate a wide variety of personalized services or products at reasonably low cost. Essentially, the firm allows customers to select from a variety of standard options to create the service or product of their choice.

1 Competitive advantages

A mass customization strategy has three important competitive advantages.

➢ Managing customer relationships

Mass customization requires detailed inputs from customers. The firm can learn a lot about its customers from the data it receives. Once customers are in the database, the firm can keep track of them over time.

➢ Eliminate finished goods inventory

Producing to a customer’s order is more efficient than producing to a forecast because forecasts are not perfect. The trick is to have everything you need to produce the order quickly. A technology some firms use for their order placement process is a software system called a configurator, which gives firms and customers easy access to data relevant to the options available for the service or product.

➢ Increased perceived value of services or products

With mass customization, customers can have it their way. In general, most customization often has a higher value in the mind of the customer than