Characteristics of integrated supply chain management

INDITEX, the parent company of Zara, is regarded as a textbook case of fast fashion supply chain management. What kind of advanced management can create such a fast reverse speed of supply chain? No need to ask Gartner or the top 25 suppliers directly. Any small partner with a little experience in supply chain management can realize that their supply chain not only uses high-level digital and intelligent technology, but also successfully organizes, implements and integrates technologies to promote intelligent supply chain so as to improve supply chain visualization and create higher value. This is the strong support behind the top 25 supply chain strength of Niubi, and all the listed giants with annual revenue of more than 12 billion US dollars can do that.

Let’s not think about the world’s top supply chain master enterprises for the moment. In the face of innovative technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, optimizing the supply chain operation mode is the top priority for enterprises to realize the integrated supply chain management. So first of all, we must understand: what are the characteristics of supply chain integrated management?

The editor has collected a lot of opinions on the Internet. It’s hard to have a unified conclusion. We may as well go back to the next step, first understand the concept of supply chain integration, then follow the lead to figure out the characteristics of supply chain integration management. The integrated management of supply chain is a kind of thought and method of integrated management, which undertakes the logistics planning and control functions from suppliers to end users in the supply chain.

Based on this analysis, the characteristics of supply chain integrated management generally include four points: overall strategic management, integrated management, new concept of inventory, customer-centric.

What is overall strategic management?
Traditional management is based on departments, so it is difficult to give full play to its functional efficiency. Therefore, it is difficult to achieve the overall goal. The integrated management of supply chain is different. It regards all nodes as an organic whole, so it will realize information sharing, risk sharing and benefit coexistence among all node enterprises, and realize the importance and necessity of supply chain management from a strategic point of view, so as to realize the effective management of the whole. Integrated management

Such integrated management of supply chain, starting from suppliers, through manufacturers, distributors, retailers, to the end customers, is a new management strategy. We can find from the solutions that SAP helps many top 500 enterprises and large and medium-sized enterprises that building an end-to-end management mode is a typical integrated management to help enterprises realize the transformation of digital supply chain.

New concept of inventory
The most famous sentence about inventory is “inventory is the root of all evils” of Toyota, Japan. How to solve the root of this evil? Integrated supply chain management brings us different ways? Establish strategic cooperation relationship with all enterprises in the supply chain, reduce the total cost of inventory and enterprise risk through rapid response.

Customer focus
Customers are the direction of business, and the needs of customers and final consumers have the value of supply chain, so how can we better meet the needs of consumers? Many cases of SAP bring us more thinking. One of the most core strategic ideas: unswervingly adhering to the concept of customer-centric. In practice, SAP also runs it through every link of the supply chain, providing them with unique personalized experience. Of course, this is only a part of it, more importantly, they also design the operation of the supply chain according to the specific needs and requirements of each customer, and provide customers with a large number of personalized customized products.

These are the main macro characteristics of supply chain integrated management, but we can enrich and develop in more practice and get more value. For a more comprehensive understanding, consult your acloudear — SAP partner.

This article "Characteristics of integrated supply chain management" by AcloudEAR. We focus on business applications such as cloud ERP.

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