The field of supply chain management is gaining importance in today’s increasingly competitive global marketplace. Be it service or physical goods industry, supply chain management forms the most important link between the supplier/service provider and the customer. With growing competition and reducing margins, SCM has become an essential element for company’s success and customer satisfaction by integrating supply and demand management within and across companies.

SCM drives coordination of processes and activities with and across marketing, sales, product design, finance, and IT. The continual advancement in information technology and expanding IT infrastructure are creating new opportunities to improve service values and efficiencies, and given the amount of business value at stake, the opportunities in this vertical are very high. It contributes to business performance by finding ways to get the goods to the customer in a better, faster and cheaper manner.

SCM aims to improve efficiency, productivity and profitability of the entire process. Today when the customer has direct access to global suppliers, the number of competing vendors in every category is huge. Global markets have created stiff competition in the market place thereby compelling companies to maintain competitive prices. Thus, the ability to produce a given product at a ‘good’ cost can give any company tremendous competitive advantage irrespective of its geographical location. And increased volumes in the global market add substantially to the company’s bottom-line. SCM is all about adding value to the business by achieving higher volumes and better service levels either by reducing or without having to raise costs.

Supply chain managers are essentially the implementers of the procurement strategy, the manufacturing plan and the distribution scheme in alignment with the goals of the company. Since the industry realizes the extent to which the synergy of all these activities determines the overall profitability of any firm, a lot of effort is directed towards improving the efficiency of supply chain. Strategic Sourcing, tracking the material, productivity Management, Total Quality Management (TQM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are the vital tools for successful implementation of SCM. With the ever increasing complexity of supply chain operations, organizations are seeking specialized managers who are exclusively trained in supply chain management.

Here are some highlights of the multi-faceted role SCM Manager is expected to play:

Relationship Management: SCM practitioners need to manage upstream and downstream relationships with vendors and customers in order to deliver superior value to the user at an optimum cost. As organizations grow and expand to reach out more customers globally or to source the most cost effective suppliers they are offloading their non-core activities thereby increasing their dependencies on external system. The skills in relationship management will therefore be very vital in managing the service providers and suppliers. It is one’s relationship with the supplier/vendor which will enable one to continue to get things done even during a complex situation. Excellent management skills, domain expertise and winning attitude will be required to sustain supply chain management network across boundaries.

Responsive Supply Chain: Speed is the name of the game. Organizations which are able to respond to changing customer requirements will have a leading edge in this vertical. The knowledge of process management and continuous improvement will have to be acquired by professionals who wish to lead and want to capture a bigger pie of the market. The organizations will have to restructure from being function based companies to process based companies so that they are more customer oriented and responsive. It is very much likely that responsive chains would be little costly but customer will appreciate if they see value getting created in the process.

Integrated Management Approach: Professionals should not only possess strong SCM competencies but should have willingness to acquire good understanding of end to end supply chain business so that they can manage the cross functional teams for quick and efficient response for the customer.

To be successful SCM manager one will have to have through understanding of all the important business functions which are involved in the business of supply value network. The professional is expected to know sales and operations planning, understanding of relevant technology tools and good costing skills. Other important techniques like Business process re-engineering, lean thinking capabilities and a customer centric approach will add a lot of value to a SCM professional.

-- Prof Dr Nitin Joshi

Associate Professor (Operations/ Marketing), WeSchool

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