Introduction to Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Supply chain management (SCM) is perhaps the premier operations management strategy for companies seeking to establish and maintain competitive advantage in today’s global marketplace. SCM is important because businesses have come to recognize that their capacity to continuously reinvent competitive advantage depends as much on their ability to look outward to their channel partners as it does leveraging their internal capabilities. Channel partners assist companies to generate the innovative ideas and resources necessary to assemble the right blend of competencies that will resonate with their own organizations and the wants and needs of their marketplaces. Today, no corporate leader believes that their organization can survive and prosper acting independently of its suppliers and customers. In fact, perhaps the ultimate core competency an enterprise may possess is not to be found in a temporary advantage it may hold in a product or process, but rather in its ability to continuously assemble and implement market-winning capabilities arising from collaborative alliances with their supply chain partners.

The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7578-2_16