Supply Chain Management - Origin of The Term and Definitions

Origin of The Term and Definitions

The term "supply chain management" entered the public domain when Keith Oliver, a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, used it in an interview for the Financial Times in 1982. The term was slow to take hold and the lexicon was slow to change. It gained currency in the mid-1990s, when a flurry of articles and books came out on the subject. In the late 1990s it rose to prominence as a management buzzword, and operations managers began to use it in their titles with increasing regularity.

Common and accepted definitions of supply chain management are:

• Managing upstream and down stream value added flow of materials, final goods and related information among suppliers; company; resellers; final consumers is supply chain management.

• Supply chain management is the systematic, strategic coordination of the traditional business functions and the tactics across these business functions within a particular company and across businesses within the supply chain, for the purposes of improving the long-term performance of the individual companies and the supply chain as a whole (Mentzer et al., 2001).

• A customer focused definition is given by Hines (2004:p76) "Supply chain strategies require a total systems view of the linkages in the chain that work together efficiently to create customer satisfaction at the end point of delivery to the consumer. As a consequence costs must be lowered throughout the chain by driving out unnecessary costs and focusing attention on adding value. Throughput efficiency must be increased, bottlenecks removed and performance measurement must focus on total systems efficiency and equitable reward distribution to those in the supply chain adding value. The supply chain system must be responsive to customer requirements."

• Global supply chain forum - supply chain management is the integration of key business processes across the supply chain for the purpose of creating value for customers and stakeholders (Lambert, 2008).

• According to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), supply chain management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing, procurement, conversion, and logistics management. It also includes the crucial components of coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third-party service providers, and customers. In essence, supply chain management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies. More recently, the loosely coupled, self-organizing network of businesses that cooperate to provide product and service offerings has been called the Extended Enterprise.

A supply chain, as opposed to supply chain management, is a set of organizations directly linked by one or more of the upstream and downstream flows of products, services, finances, and information from a source to a customer. Managing a supply chain is 'supply chain management' (Mentzer et al., 2001).

Supply chain management software includes tools or modules used to execute supply chain transactions, manage supplier relationships and control associated business processes.

Supply chain event management (abbreviated as SCEM) is a consideration of all possible events and factors that can disrupt a supply chain. With SCEM possible scenarios can be created and solutions devised.

In many cases the supply chain includes the collection of goods after consumer use for recycling. Including 3PL or other gathering agencies as part of the RM re-patriation process is a way of illustrating the new end-game strategy.