Supply Chain Management

Essay by babydoll77stlUniversity, Bachelor'sA, May 2010

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Dana Sackman

Week 1 - Supply Chain Management Paper

ISCOM 370 - Strategic Supply Chain Management

March 22, 2010

University of Phoenix - Leon Powell

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Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management can be described as 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 it to customers. The purpose of this paper is to define what supply chain management is and to review the supply chain evolution within Energizer Holdings, Inc.

There are five basic components of supply chain management and they are:

Planning is the strategic portion of SCM. Companies need a strategy for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for their product or service. A big piece of SCM 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.

Next, companies must choose suppliers to deliver the goods and services they need to create their product and this is sourcing. 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, SCM 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 (CIO, 2010).

The third step is the production of the product. 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 chain-one where companies are able to measure quality levels, production output and worker productivity (CIO, 2010).

Delivering the product to the customer is the last step. This is the part that many SCM 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 receive payments (CIO, 2010).

Returning product is the last step. Supply chain planners have to create a responsive and flexible network for receiving defective and excess products back from their customers and supporting customers who have problems with delivered products (CIO, 2010).

According to the ERP website, Supply chain management (SCM) is the oversight of materials, information, and finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. Supply chain management involves coordinating and integrating these flows both within and among companies. It is said that the ultimate goal of any effective supply chain management system is to reduce inventory (with the assumption that products are available when needed). As a solution for successful supply chain management, sophisticated software systems with Web interfaces are competing with Web-based application service providers who promise to provide part or all of the SCM service for companies who rent their service (Supply Chain Management, 2010).

Energizer is a global organization that has been in business for over 10 years. With these 10 years, Energizer's supply chain operations have evolved in a tremendous way. Customer orders used to be all paper orders sent via fax machine or mailed directly to the Energizer office. Now the customer orders are sent via Electronic Data Interface (EDI) which means that the customer service specialists don't have to physically touch any orders, and it saves the tree. And because customer orders are coming through via EDI, it allows the customer service specialists to spend more time on tracking orders for customers, reviewing customer items to make sure Energizer's data matches the customers data, and additional duties. In all, having technology process orders saves the customers time and money, which will allow the products to arrive faster.

Energizer has also purchased over four companies in the past 10 years, which has expanded the supply chain processes across the board, in America and all other countries where Energizer does business. With the addition of new companies, meant more customer bases and also more employees.

Energizer's product portfolio has grown so much because of customer needs, technology, and of course because of the acquisitions. Having such an expanded product portfolio allows Energizer to have the ability to reach more customer bases than they did once before.

Energizer is a successful global organization that is doing what they can to expand the organization in order to stay competitive and to reach out to more customers. After all, the pink bunny keeps going and going, and so should the organization.

References

CIO. (2010). Supply Chain Management Definition and Solutions. Retrieved March 21, 2010, from CIO: http://www.cio.com/article/40940/Supply_Chain_Management_Definition_and_Solutions

Supply Chain Management. (2010). Retrieved March 21, 2010, from SearchManufacturingERP: http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid193_gci214546,00.html