Crm and supply chain management.

Essay by dannyparkinUniversity, Master'sA, October 2003

download word file, 7 pages 5.0

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management.

In today's global competitive market, first class products no longer guarantee success in the aggressive battle for market share. To be successful, organizations need to increase their productivity and reduce costs. To survive in the present global competitive environment, organizations need to show a heightened awareness to customers' needs. Hence, there is an increased focus on a customer-centric business models and integration of supply chains to enable collaboration between the supply chain partners.

Smarter organizations have realized the need to use information technology to transform the way they deal with the suppliers and customers and the need for real-time communication between the partners. The Internet provides a great opportunity to automate the supply chain and provide organizations with real-time information across various points in their value chain. It guarantees reduction in costs and improved productivity by identifying process enhancement opportunities.

Supply Chain Management is simply the process of optimizing the delivery of goods, services and information from supplier to customer, balancing supply and demand.

Supply chain management is typically viewed to lie between fully integrated firms, where the entire material flow is owned by a single firm. Decisions for a supply chain management system are broken into two broad categories, strategic and operational. As the term implies, strategic decisions are made typically over longer time period. The essence of Supply chain management is to shift away from business units such as warehouses or factories to a more hollowed view of the supply chain. Specific hardware changes that helped boost the importance of Supply Chain Management include the shrinking of both the size and cost of each computer. The reduced size of memory chips made for the easy shrinkage of the computer due to the large portion of space that this component...