The objectives of supply chain management are to meet the requirements of being customers by supplying appropriate products and services when they are needed at a competitive cost. Doing this requires the supply chain to achieve appropriate levels of five operations

 

a) performance objectives,

b) quality base

c) dependability

d) flexibility

e) cost.

 

Take each choice separately. Define the choice in supply chain context and explain how decisions relating to the choice affect the performance of supply chain operations, five by five marks 25 marks. 

 

A. PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES 

- this factor plays as a main key to ensure efficiency within your business operations. Efficient and effective management of work flow, inventory, transportation, and logistics can be a challenging process, but overall understanding how to achieve and do your objectives can greatly benefit your work operation. Performance objectives also improves and maintains overall stability of a business in the supply chain. With good objectives businesses can aim to increase and maintain strong relationships with their suppliers and distributors to make sure that business continues to run smoothly and continuously .

B. QUALITY BASE

- The supply chain management directly impacts product quality and the overall profitability of a company. For quality aspects, supply chain is critical for maintaining an organizations competitive edge among competitors in the marketplace and reducing business operating costs. With the application of continuous quality management improvement, defects, process and production issues, are reduced. In return, as the consistency in the supply chain improves due to the issues reduction, cycle times are reduced and on-time delivery improves.

C. DEPENDABILITY

- the supply chain dependability or reliability refers to the degree or level to which a business yields consistent performance. The dependability and maintainability of the process makes it possible to produce a cost-competitive product. The supply chain makes sure that the quality product is delivered in a cost effective and timely manner. Working together, dependability and the logistics/supply chain can improve the availability and on-time delivery of an organization.

D. FLEXIBILITY

- With the application of flexibility to supply chain management is being able to respond to abnormality and fluctuations from the surroundings of the supply chain. This also means responding to constant changes in the demand or supply quickly and handling external disruptions effectively. With flexibility a company can easily adjust to dynamic production levels, raw material purchases, and transportations capacity in order to maximize business profits. When the demand is high the company can boost production, with minimal operating cost.

E. COST

 - The aspect of cost reduction is the most cited goals in supply chain management. With the effective application of cost management this provides a way for an organization to form a competitive advantage to its competitors without needing to lower its prices while allowing it to deliver orders more quickly to customers. By the use of SCM to reduce costs, organizations can focus also on it's operations main factors such as: space optimization, defects reduction and packaging minimization.